Hip Hop Theology: Reclaiming the Prophetic-Poetic Tradition

“The day will come when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’ language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power.”

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Introduction

These prophetic words of Bonhoeffer, penned from a prison cell in Nazi Germany, come from the depths of his anguish and despair over the German church’s utter loss of credibility during his time.  Though on the surface they continued their liturgy and baptisms, they had sold their soul to Hitler and the Nazis and failed to live as authentic disciples of Christ.  When God is honored in name during worship services, but injustice, hatred, violence, racism, and oppression go unquestioned and unchecked by those claiming to be God’s people, the prophets boldly announce God’s hatred of our worship and reiterate God’s call: “Take away from me the noise of your songs…but let justice roll like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:23-24).  Amos shows us that when our words about God (theo-logia) become worn-out expressions, emptied of practical meaning and ethical consequences, not only is this displeasing, but God actually hates this (v. 21).  Thus, when this happens, God raises up prophets to speak the Word anew, powerfully and profoundly addressing the pressing concerns of the current time.  This is why prophecy is so intimately connected to poetry—it becomes a vehicle for transcending language through language itself, of getting beyond the restrictive rigidity of common and conventional expression and point to a greater truth and to pronounce God’s word anew.

Thus, there is much more at stake in the theological exploration of hip hop than merely a way of making theology more “relevant” to contemporary youth, reaching the “unchurched,” or using its aesthetic idioms simply as an evangelistic tool and a ready-made cultural container into which we can insert church doctrines and scripture verses.  While these approaches represent the vast majority of previous attempts by the church to engage hip hop culture, they are insufficient because they fail to truly listen to the community they seek to reach out to.  What is needed is an approach that hears and accepts the voices of the hip hop community in their own right.  To do this, we must first understand that hip hop is more than just a kind of music, a subculture, or a set of aesthetic principles; it is all of that and more.  We must explore the poetics of hip hop how all of these aspects are interwoven to construct meaning and intelligibility.  Only then can we begin to grapple with its theological content.  I will begin by outlining a basic understanding of the essential historical, cultural, and poetic roots of hip hop. After establishing the hermeneutical context of hip hop theology, I will articulate three key aspects: God’s solidarity with the suffering of the oppressed, the prophetic denunciation of hypocrisy in contemporary Christian worship, and the prophetic denunciation of the dominant American culture.  Each section will include direct examples of contemporary hip hop artists who take up this prophetic-poetic tradition to speak to contemporary circumstances.

Part I: Defining Hip Hop

Hip hop is, in a sense, a cultural dialectic; it functions as a bridge to merge contrasts in aesthetic and cultural convention. Theodore Adorno defines art as “a critique of praxis.”

Hip-hop, in this sense, is a critique of conventional linguistic, cultural, religious and aesthetic practices.  The dialectic of hip hop is fundamentally acheived in the “mix”—a re-contextualization of the artist’s surrounding elements, including musical and nonmusical sounds, religious and philosophical ideas, conventional and subversive language, popular culture, politics, history, and community—all of which are “sampled” from their disparate sources and mixed together into a new cohesive unit.  The new context of these elements is aimed at deconstructing conventional dichotomies through juxtaposition.  This juxtaposition is what allows hip hop to function as a dialectic of literary and musical tradition, of sacred and profane, of noise and music, and of originality and reproduction.  While hip hop is, in a sense, a part of Western culture, it is imperative that hip hop be understood primarily as a specifically African-American type.

Its unique situation in both the local community and within the wider context of musical and cultural tradition creates the hybridized dialectic through which hip hop critiques convention and constructs new meanings out of sampled material.

If hip hop is ever to be properly understood academically, then a convergence of multiple disciplines is need—these include musicology, history, sociology, economics, political science, theology, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies.  Any one-dimensional academic approach will fall short of a full account of what hip hop truly is.  For example, Music theory, in its attempt to focus solely on the musical aspects of hip hop, will also neglect the way that historical and cultural themes are so deeply saturated into the music itself; and even music history will run the risk of reducing hip hop to a postmodern musical development out of a linear progression instead of seeing it as a musical dialogue between past and present.  Though exceedingly difficult to define, hip-hop is primarily about finding a crossroads, or a convergence somewhere in the mixture of differing elements.

The greatest composers of hip-hop are master synthesizers; artists who are able to create harmony out of sounds and ideas that seem to have no interrelationship.  Thus, to fully understand them will require a thorough explication of their “poetics”—here taken in the widest possible sense, so as to include any meaning constructs, whether musical, linguistic, or otherwise.

African-American Language tradition

It is often said that hip-hop is a hybrid form. Much of what is called hybridization in hip-hop arises out of the unique cultural dynamic resulting from the tension between a minority African-American subculture and the dominant mainstream American and Western culture.  In 1903, African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term “second sight,” in order to depict this unique intra-cultural dynamic.  Du Bois asserted that the black minority understood the white majority to a much higher degree than the obverse; often, according to Du Bois, the minority even understands the majority better than they understand themselves.

The concept of second sight can be applied to many aspects of African-American culture as a means of understanding its intersection with the majority culture.  Second sight opens the possibility for a discursive subtext, wherein the dominant culture can be challenged and subverted without the majority’s comprehension.  An extremely significant manifestation of such a subtext is the usage and development of African-American Vernacular English.

Linguistically, it is an admixture of Southern English with some grammatical elements remaining from the West African language family, and the incorporation of continuously formed slang expressions.  Its origin is in preserving some degree of linguistic autonomy from slave masters; African-American vernacular culture has always been, and continues to exist as a discursive challenge to dominant cultural forces.

For AAVE to continuously function as a medium for cultural identity and subtext, it relies on the constant invention of new words and phrases as older expressions become absorbed by the mainstream.  While new words preserve a degree of obscurity on a grammatical and semantic level, AAVE harbors much greater cultural depth as a discourse based on how African-Americans use language, what they use it to say, and what verbal routines are used in this communicative practice (Perry, 25).  The way in which AAVE remixes conventional linguistic expression into a creative trope to heighten the meaning imparted to those familiar with this process is at the aesthetic core of hip hop.

Thus, more must be understood about African American linguistic practice than a merely semantic comprehension of slang terms.  The distinction between literate and oral dissemination of linguistic culture is also important.  The preference for oral culture gives African American language a uniquely performative character.  The use of print in literate tradition tends to freeze concepts as they are written, whereas oral tradition, by virtue of its “actionality,” maintains a much looser paradigm for communication and perception alike.  Barbara Christian elaborates in her essay “The Race for Theory,” that, “people of color have always theorized, but…our theorizing…is often…in the play with language, since dynamic, rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.”

Though often judged and misunderstood by those outside the hip hop community, the use of coarse and abrasive creative language to avoid physical violence has long been important feature of African-American culture.

Henry Louis Gates identifies one example, which he dubbed signifyin’ —a form of verbal affront distinguished by the use of an indirect sub-textual delivery through double-entendre and metaphor. Signifyin’ is further characterized by its use of humor, irony, rhythmic fluidity, subtly didactic imagery and wordplay to introduce the semantically or logically unexpected.

In keeping with the Du Boisian concept of second sight, signifyin’ can be used in two basic ways: it can be directed at a fellow minority who understands its implications, or it can be used more subversively to target a member of the dominant class so that the minority group understands the insult, while the receiver remains ignorant.  Hip hop similarly employs these techniques of subversive poetry, which requires artists to constantly coin new words and idioms so they never lose their poignancy.

Hip Hop Is Born

In the mid 1970s, a time of marked economic downturn, there was very little funding for musical education in inner-city school districts.  As disco clubs also began to decline, due in part to their negative association with gang violence, there was a glaring absence of musical opportunity for young African-Americans. The youth of Brooklyn, New York began to fill this artistic void with an emerging outdoor block party scene.  They would plug in to light posts outside to play recorded music and dance.

As it became evident that the dancing crowds loved the highly syncopated drum breaks of funk records more than the rest of the music, DJs began the practice of looping these drum breaks.  With two turntables, a DJ could either use two copies of the same record to loop a break as long as was desired, or he could superimpose two records into one sound.

The techniques of these early DJs effectively transformed them from mere consumers of recorded music into creative producers in their own right.

Thus, from its inception, hip hop has been a community-centered movement devoted to liberating and empowering marginalized and disenfranchised young people and to give a voice to the voiceless.

Hip Hop’s Poetics

There are several ways in which the poetic conventions of hip hop create and strengthen bonds of community and identity among its marginalized progenitors.  Most immediate is an MC’s “flow”—the rhythmic delivery of rhyming lyrics. Flow is an admixture of originality (without which an MC would be dismissed) and stylistic convention (without which an MC would fail to identify with an established listening community).  In the hip hop community, for example, the rhythmic style of flow by itself can inform listeners of its historical period and geographical origin.  Since identity is an immensely important aspect of hip hop music, locality must be explicitly manifested in an MC’s style.

The emphasis on identity construction in particular local communities is thus underscored by the fact that sound characteristics that may be authentic and accepted in one city may be considered disingenuous or unpleasant in another.

Community representation thus occurs at a purely aesthetic level, as mediated by cultural interpretation, in addition to what the MC alludes to in the lyrics of a song.  Such emphasis on cultural authenticity, or realness in hip-hop is unprecedented in other forms of popular music; not because other popular musics are inauthentic, but because authenticity is less critical to the creation and reception of the music.

This is evidenced by the fact that, from the perspective of hip hop artists and listeners, there

appears to be more poetic/stylistic variation along regional lines than any other means of classification.

Another aspect of hip hop poetics and construction is “sampling.”  It is simultaneously one of the most important and controversial elements of hip hop.  One of its functions, and precisely the reason for this controversy, is to contest conventional capitalist notions of property and proper citation.

It is the use of samples that gives hip hop music its unique dynamism, by allowing contrasting, and often quite disparate sounds to converge in a musical dialectic.  These sounds are brought into dialogue and archived within a hip hop composition, so that the historicity of the sampled sound is both contrasted against and brought into a contemporary context, calling into question conventional concepts of authorship, creativity, and originality.

The intersection of the aesthetic and economic implications of sampling have problematically led many to dismiss it as a means of recycling old material.  This conclusion, however, ignores the role sampling has of disseminating material to a new audience, as well as the heightened semantic poignancy achieved by using literal sounds in addition to mere allusion or reference.  As rapper Chuck D describes it:

Our music is filled with bits of information from the real world, a world that is rarely exposed.  Our songs are almost like headline news.  We bring things to the table of discussion that are not usually discussed, or at least not from our [urban African American] perspective.

Evoking a sense of realness, and giving a voice to an often neglected and marginalized life experience is central to hip hop; sampling as such is a highly useful means of bringing pieces of reality into the music.

Part II: Hip Hop Theology

This emphatic insistence on realness and authenticity, when manifested as a window into the violent and unjust conditions of inner-city life, has led to its unique admixture of the sacred and profane and its inclusion of imagery that strikes the dominant culture as offensive, grotesque, and perverse.  Yet, as Daniel White Hodge demonstrates in his own hip hop theology, the Bible itself bears witness to a history of God engaging, embracing, and working through profane contexts in order to love and liberate the marginalized.

Consistently, the biblical injunction is for us to redirect our disgust and righteous indignation from “sinners” to the conditions which lead to their sinfulness.  Hip hop theology, then, becomes a way for us to recover the profanity and hostility of our scriptural tradition which boldly calls the circumstances of injustice into question, and reintroduces us to the Jesus who embraced and uplifted prostitutes, drunks, diseased people and tax-collectors and rebuked those who ignored and disdained these profane people.  It will indeed be a vulgar theology, because, as the etymology of that word indicates, it is a theology of and for the common people.  In this sense, it is precisely the theologies which are not vulgar that are perversions of the gospel.  Hip hop theology seeks to offer a valid alternative to the problem in contemporary American Christianity that, as Hodge puts it, “We continue to want a G-rated savior in an NC-17 world.”

Since Hodge has already profoundly articulated a theology of the profane, in which biblical exegesis is brought into conversation with the hip hop cultural context, I will attempt to cover new territory and explore hip hop as a prophetic-poetic theological type.  This will take on three important assertions of hip hop theology: announcing that God identifies with the oppressed, marginalized and downtrodden, denouncing the hypocrisy of dominant Christian theology and practice, and denouncing the injustice and lack of freedom in this “land of the free.”

Rap as Prophecy

As Walter Brueggeman thoroughly demonstrates in Out of Babylon, the struggle of the poetic-prophetic tradition primarily concerned community and identity; the poetic idiom in which the prophets uttered God’s word anew was a way of preserving their local community’s identity in the midst of the challenges posed by living under the oppression and powerful influences of exile in the empire.  He relates this preserving poetic capacity of the Hebrew people in Babylon to the contemporary need to recovery this capacity to maintain allegiance to Christ in the midst of the demands to pledge allegiance to the American “empire.”  He argues, “The task is not simply to reiterate old poetry, but to learn from its cadences what now needs to be uttered.  Both the distorted chosen people and the imperious empire run roughshod over such utterance.”

Thus, the poetic-prophetic tradition Brueggeman describes is intimately connected with each of the three key aspects of hip hop theology.  Furthermore, the prophets, like rappers, were “uncredentialed utterers with no social standing,” whose authority thus came exclusively from “imaginative, playful utterance…facts on the ground connected to human bodily reality, and the claim to be connected enough to speak the truth of YHWH.”

Though hated and killed by their contemporaries, these poets are vindicated by God for their boldness and courage to speak truth where and when it was desperately needed (cf. Lk. 6:22-3).  In hip hop theology, as in the biblical prophetic tradition, this poetry is not merely an aesthetic convention, literary art form, or flight of imaginative fancy.  On the contrary, the  very articulation of the poetic imagination is liberating, both in speaking and in hearing.  Over against the dominant picture of reality which reinforces the injustice of the status quo, “It imagines otherwise; it invites its listeners to walk boldly into the world it creates. It authorizes courage, summons defiance and lines out resistance, all in the interest of legitimating the compelling force of the local tradition.”

This imagination and liberation, however, can only be available to those who maintain an authentic identity rooted in the local community; it is lost on those who have “sold out” to the prevailing imperial reality and ideology.

Similarly, in hip hop music, legitimacy and authenticity can only be maintained by “representing” (sometimes abbreviated “reppin’”) and staying true to the ‘hood from whence you came.  This is why one of the most serious charges that one rapper can lay on another is that of being “fake,” when one’s ‘hood identity is overcome and lost through the preoccupation with one’s own wealth and success.  The “commercial” rappers who parade on MTV and BET with expensive cars, jewelry, mansions, and women are often accused of leaving and forgetting the downtrodden ghetto communities they were raised in and for exploiting their previous experiences for personal profit.  A few lines from the opening verse of Common’s song “Chi-City” suffice to illustrate this trend:

Too many rape the culture

Leave rappers with careers and they faith over

It’s a war goin’ on, you can’t fake bein’ a soldier

In the basement, listening to tapes of Ultra-Magnetic,

to the fact the messiah is black

I’ll turn the TV down, we can take it higher than that

I wonder if these whack niggaz realize they whack

And they the reason that my people say they tired of rap

Represent

The main question of God in hip hop theology concerns who God “represents.”  Hip hoppers have not found a place in the church, because they do not hear about a God who loves them and identifies with their struggles there.  What they need to hear, as the rapper Nas says in his song “God Love Us,” is that, “God love[s] us hood niggaz/Cause next to Jesus on the cross was the crook niggaz…Cause he be with us in the prisons/And he takes the time to listen.”

Nas echoes the familiar strain of liberation theology with the final words of the song, “Our lives are the worst, on top of that, we broke/That’s the main reason why God love us the most.”  The clearest example of who God represents in hip hop theology, however, comes out in the spoken word poet Malik Yusef’s song, “I Spit.”  To “spit” means to rap, or to prophecy poetically, but it also conveys the image of speaking out with so much vulgarity, vigor, and passion that spit issues forth from the mouth.  The whole song is thus a passionate manifesto of solidarity, and a declaration of the specific local community who has access to the poetic-prophetic imagination:

I spit for the benefit of those who was told they was never ever gonna be shit

I spit for all those that wish to God they could just ball legit

I spit for every little ghetto boy and ghetto girl that have to beg, cry, fight and pray for each and every thing he or she get…

I spit for those that can’t speak without cursin’,

puttin’ body piercin’s and tattoos on they person,

who wanna talk to you, but them things do all the conversin’…

I spit for babies born as “pimps” and “soldiers”,

little black kids with no money, but big-ass chips on they shoulders,

I spit for those at fed joints fightin’ time,

and that’s the reason I’m writin’ rhymes

and recitin’ lime-green nouns and verbs

and slangin’/slingin’ that shit like pounds of herb just to elevate you

…

so outa all the gods claimin’ to be God, Yusef is the closest;

I spit the most lovely to the most ugly, the most beautiful to the most atrocious…

Life’s a gamble—we just roll the dice,

prayin’ that we don’t blow the heist

and if we do, let us go to Christ

and come back to raise our seeds as poltergeists

Here we get the clear picture that solidarity with the marginalized and voiceless is very important for hip hop theology.  Hip hop identifies with the Jesus who cared less about his own reputation than about loving and embracing sinners and Samaritans—who were, as Hodge puts it, “the ‘niggas’ of Jesus’ day.”

Like the Hebrew prophets, the hip hop community uses poetry to create bonds of solidarity and to partake of what Brueggemann terms “emancipitory imagination.”  Solidarity is a ministry of presence that loves and affirms the other as he or she is and which humbly listens to others in their own terms.  Hip hop can be a tremendous vehicle for this ministry of solidarity which fights the individualistic tendencies of our culture by building community.  As rapper Lupe Fiasco says, “You see the tears of fire run out my cryin’ songs/Now the world’s shoulders is what we cryin’ on…‘Cause it’s never cyclops; it’s never I alone/I’m tellin’ you story wherever I perform.”

The laments and cries that once fell upon deaf ears now have a global audience, thanks to hip hop.  The challenge for rappers like Lupe Fiasco is to continue to represent these folks by “keepin’ it real” and telling their stories.

Denouncing Religious Hypocrisy

One of the major reasons that the church has had difficulty accepting hip hop has been the perception that rappers are irreverent, sacrilegious and even blasphemous.  Even in African-American churches, hip hop is often seen as something to convert out of, rather than something to dialogue with.

Many Christians simply do not want to encounter the deeper messages of hip hop music, and perhaps rightly so; at the core, they will likely find a critical denunciation of their own tightly held theology and ideology.  Hip hop is vociferously critical of the “white Jesus” of American Christianity and the images of Jesus as an authoritarian figure, a judgmental moralist, and a timidly docile and unquestioningly obedient son—images that have been used either overtly or subliminally by the church to control and maintain the status quo.

While this domesticated Jesus imagery demands acceptance of an unacceptably unjust status quo, hip hoppers reject it in favor of a less tame and more hostile gospel—the gospel of the Jesus who is so enraged at what is going on that he violently throws over the tables of the moneylenders in the temple.  Talib Kweli, as a matter of fact, takes up this theme in his song appropriately titled “Hostile Gospel.”  The repeated chorus of the song sums up quite well:

This is the hostile gospel

I’m reaching through the fire (please deliver us)

I’m preaching to the choir (please deliver us)

Just keep it real with us, you scared to spill your blood

Your words rung hollow, we need someone to follow

In fact, Kweli’s entire Ear Drum album is wrought with this kind of prophetic address, clearly illustrating that the criterion for differentiating between the real, “hostile” gospel and the “hollow” one being preached in the churches is whether and to what degree solidarity is established with the marginalized people of the ghetto.  Thus, in another song, he says:

I’m not a judge, but I’m handing out sentences

To political prisoners, regular inmates with no visitors

Niggas in the streets outside to reach up for ministers

Not those that say they spiritual but actual parishioners—rap listeners

Kweli’s words here are reminiscent of those of Jesus Matthew 25, where he chastises those who call him “Lord” but fail to love and serve his people.  Far from being irreverent or blasphemous, the prophetic denunciation of Christian hypocrisy in hip hop is akin to Christ’s own words, “Woe to you…hypocrites!” in Matthew 23.

Kweli’s song “Give ‘Em Hell” summarizes the denunciation of religious hypocrisy far more poignantly than anything I could offer:

Every Sunday dressin’ up, catchin’ gossip at its worst

Couldn’t see the difference in the Baptist and the Catholic Church…

If we all God’s children then what’s the word of the reverend worth?

Taught early that faith is blind, like justice when you facin’ [jail] time

If we all made in God’s image, then that means His faces is mine

Wait, or is that blasphemy? It’s logical, it has to be—

If I don’t look like my father, then the way I live is bastardly

Naturally, that’s confusin’ to a young’n tryin’ to follow Christ,

Taught that if you don’t know Jesus then you lead a hollow life,

Never question the fact that Jesus was Jewish, not a Christian

Or that Christianity was law according to politicians…

They say Hell is underground and Heaven is in the sky

And they say that’s where you go when you die, but how they know?

We know that what we reap we sow

But we forget how low we can go

You think it’s bad here on earth but if we can’t get to heaven it’s hell…

So it all sound the same to me

That’s why when they say one [religion] is right and the other’s wrong

It just sound like game

to me

It’s like God skipped past the church and came to me

No, that ain’t vane to me; it’s just a particular way that I came to see…

The poem’s divine ‘cause it coincide with the growin’ tide

Of those who lookin’ for God, knowin’ to go inside

Livin’ in mass confusion, lookin’ for absolution…produce the last solution

Based on an interpretation of what the words were sayin’

Tryin’ to get to God but ended up doin’ the work of Satan,

Religion create[s] division: make the Muslim hate the Christian,

Make the Christian hate the Jew,

Make the rules of faith that you conditioned to and gotta follow

Or God forbid, you go to Hell,

But if you ever walked through any ghetto, then you know it well…

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,”

Just because the Lord is my shepherd don’t mean I gotta be no sheep

You feel me?

More blood is spilled over religion than anything in world history

We sayin’ the same thing

Kweli’s narrative is interwoven with numerous scriptural idioms, which he turns inside out into a critique of the vanity of contemporary religiosity.  There is no place for a holier-than-thou, judgmental theology or for fire and brimstone condemnations in the ghetto Kweli comes from; it is hard to instill a ‘holy fear’ of going to Hell in a group of people who already live there and “know it well.”  Thus, Kweli and those whom he represents, since they already live in Hell on earth, look for their liberation in a Heaven that is also on earth.

Denouncing Empire and Injustice

Perhaps the most central and prevalent prophetic mode of hip hop concerns the denunciation of the social and political structures of oppression.  Having come from the ghettos and inner-cities of this nation, hip hoppers are well aware that American imperial ideology is rooted in lies and half-truths.  The “American dream” and the promise of economic prosperity have never been a reality for the ghetto.  In fact, since the 1980s, economic inequality has dramatically increased, as the wealthiest Americans continue to be the profiteers of the wars and economic crises that plague the rest of the nation.  This the background out of which Lupe Fiasco says:

Your child’s future was the first to go with budget cuts

If you think that hurts then wait, here comes the upper cut

The school was garbage in the first place, that’s on the up and up

Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper crust

You get it then the move you so you never keepin’ up enough…

Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist

Gaza Strip was gettin’ bombed, Obama didn’t say shit

That’s why I ain’t vote for him, next one neither

I’m a part of the problem, my problem is I’m peaceful

And I believe in the people

On the same album Lupe Fiasco expounds on his critique of the American media—both its empty messages and propagandistic tendencies in a song called “State Run Radio.”  In his view, the corporate interests that control American media are hardly different from the government-controlled media of oppressive regimes.  Though the title alone is perhaps indicting enough, he elaborates:

We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special message ‘bout the forecast:

The future’s cloudy and it’s rainin’ on the poor class

The roads to peace are closed and the traffic’s on the war paths

Love is ballin’ on a budget,

the military’s stressin’

‘We need more cash to keep fighting for your gas’

Keep us in our ‘hoods and hope we never explore past

‘Stay inside of your half, believe the lies you learn in your class,

That there’s no treasure in/and your/you’re

trash,

And the ceiling has the same feeling the floor has,

And that’s where you should stay,’

This is what they play…over again, and over again, and over again…

The thrust of his argument is thus that there are no uplifting messages for the downtrodden people of the ghetto in mainstream American media, in spite of the fact that their destitution is the result of a process that profits the few and impoverishes the many.  Similarly, Brueggemann suggests that the best way to understand the liturgy of prophetic poetry is to contrast it to the traits that predominate in the empire’s own liturgy, which is “all doxology, all praise, all celebration, all self-affirmation, and all victorious confidence.”

Such propagandistic self-delusion is loudly trumpeted in an attempt to drown out the dissenting voices.  In Fox News tells us they are “fair and balanced” enough times, while we actually believe them?  Nas thinks not, and explicitly seeks to call Fox and other American mainstream media out in his song “Sly Fox.”  Disgusted with the double-standards and hypocrisy of the media, Nas says, “I watch CBS and I see BS…make a nigga wanna invest in PBS.”  In the same song, he is especially critical of the way in which the American media demonizes hip hop and African-American culture by labeling it gratuitously violent:

They say I’m all about murder murder and kill kill,

But what about Grindhouse and Kill Bill?

What about Cheney and Halliburton—the back door deals on oil fields?

How is Nas the most violent person?

In his song “America,” Nas further elaborates on the hypocritical double standards:

The hypocrisy is all I can see

White cop acquitted for murder, black cop cop a plea

That type of shit make me stop and think we in chronic need

Of a second look at the law books, and the whole race dichotomy—

Too many rappers, athletes, and actors,

But not enough niggas in NASA

Who give you the latest dances, trends, and fashions?

But when it comes to residuals, they look past us;

Woven into the fabric, they can’t stand us

Even in white tee’s, blue jeans, and red bandanas…

Assassinations [=] diplomatic relations,

Killed indigenous people [to] build a new nation [with] involuntary labor…

Ain’t we in the free world?

Barbarity…how far [are] we really from third world savagery?

When the empire fall, imagine how crazy that’ll be,

America…this is not what you think it is

Conclusion

Only recently are theologians and academics of the mainstream beginning to catch on to the prophetic validity of such criticisms that have prevailed in hip hop culture for over two decades.  Nas’s closing questions in “America” give us ample food for thought.  While it is easy to sell our allegiance to the empire in order to gain wealth, status, and notoriety, the historical and the prophetic witnesses tell us that all empires crumble.  To what will we hold fast?  Where does our true loyalty lie?  With whom shall we identify?  These are the questions that hip hop theology will not allow us to evade.  We can no longer retreat to a “safe” gospel and the domesticated Christ who protects the interests of the privileged, but then again, we never really could.  After all, it was Christ himself, and not any contemporary rapper, who first warned us that we would have to take up our crosses, and lay down our lives.  Whether or not hip hop constitutes the way of speaking God’s word that will change and renew the world, as Bonhoeffer hoped for, it cannot be disputed that it is a “quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’ language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power.”

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Ramsey Jr, Guthrie P. Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop. Chicago: Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, 2003.

Salaam, Mtume ya. “The Aesthetics of Rap.” African American Review (1995): 303-315.

Discography

Common. Be. Geffen, 2005.

Lupe Fiasco. LASERS. Atlantic, 2011.

Nas. Nastradamus. Sony, 1999.

_____ Untitled. Def Jam, 2008.

Yusef, Malik. The Great Chicago Fire: A Cold Day in Hell. Ark 21, 2003.

Kweli, Talib. Ear Drum. Warner Brothers, 2007.

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The Dao, the Truth, and the Life: Jesus and Laozi in Ethical Dialogue

February 11, 2011

Preface — All Theology Is Contextual and Autobiographical

In recent years much ink has been spilled to delineate what has been called Contextual Theology.  Implicit in this characterization are many strains of theological contexts that are bracketed off with adjectival labels such as Asian, Black, Latin American, African, Liberation, Feminist, and many more.  Certainly the openness of such theologians to claim their cultural, ethnic, and social heritage as a theological starting point has marked a step forward from modernist pretense of neutrality and pure objectivity.  The problem is that such bracketing has had a tendency to reduce the scope and voice of theologians labeled “contextual” and has thus become the basis for continuing to marginalize their viewpoints.  This is because the project of contextualization has not fully reached and absorbed the mainstream of dominant group theology: Caucasian Western European and North American Male Theology.  It must finally be admitted that this too is a subjective theological context that limits neutrality and objectivity and conditions viewpoints.  In this spirit, I can only begin my own religious and inter-religious investigation here with a brief word of autobiography—of claiming and owning my own theological context.

My own encounter with the Daodejing (DDJ)

has been inextricably bound up with my religious journey.  Though I was raised within the tightly knit cultural religious and ethnic fabric of the Dutch Reformed tradition, my academic explorations as an undergraduate student of music and history led to a radical schism from my religious past.  The religious symbols and theological ideas I had grown up with seemed cold and dead; what had furnished meaning for my childhood understanding of life and the universe seemed no longer to make any sense.  Even worse, all of the other philosophies, cultures, and religions, which as a child I was forbidden from even exploring, suddenly began to reveal new vantage points and perspectives that seemed far more valid than I was ever told. During this crisis of meaning and faith in my life, I had to take a self-guided course in the major world religions through which I encountered for the very first time the DDJ.   While devouring its 84 chapters, I experienced the only moment in my life that I could honestly describe as a religious conversion.  What this experience did, far from exporting me even further from my Christian roots, was reignite the seemingly tired and dead voice of the divine in the Holy Bible.  Suddenly it began to make sense to me as this ancient Chinese text began to breathe new life into Christian theology.  Every paradox-laden verse sent flashes through my mind of similar verses in the Bible that spoke to the same theme of reversals—so much so that it felt, for me, as though Christ himself was speaking to me through these ancient Chinese verses and beckoning me back to faith in his Way.  From the very first verse of the DDJ came the affirming acknowledgement that words are inadequate to fully contain the fullness of the Dao and that when it is put into words it is reduced and ceases to be the true Dao—this had echoed my reservations with the anthropomorphic imagery of God in the Christian tradition and its utter inadequacy to fully attest to the fullness of divine reality.

Throughout my subsequent studies in Christian theology, my understanding of the DDJ has constantly shaped and challenged my perspective and reconstituted my hermeneutical approach to my own faith.  It has shifted my theological context to the margins, in between two scripture and faith traditions.

Though I can only claim to identify with the Daoist tradition as one reading Daoist texts from a Christian perspective, I am nevertheless rooted in both traditions.  Because of my inter-religious experience, something has been added that cannot be taken away; I can only read the Bible with the DDJ in the back of my mind, and I can only likewise read the Daoist texts with the Bible in mind.  Inter-religious dialogue is not merely a rigid external discipline of encounter between two absolute and insoluble others; it is a transformative process of interpenetration that is equally, or perhaps even primarily, internal.  What follows is an attempt to give voice to this inter-religious dialogue from within and to bring other voices and perspectives—in particular, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, and Asian-American theologian Jung Young Lee—into the conversation.  I have chosen Moltmann because the cultural and theological background from which he encounters the DDJ are similar to my own, and Lee because of his different background in East Asian philosophy and religion and his unique and bold attempts to ground his own Christian theology in Daoist concepts.  Both theologians, furthermore, express reservations about the inadequacy of grounding Christian doctrine and biblical interpretation on the presuppositions of Greek philosophy, and both go to considerable length in their writings to question the degree to which reading the Bible through a Hellenistic hermeneutical lens has distorted true Christian doctrine and contributed to the inability of Christian theology to solve some of its most persistent problems.  What follows is an attempt to lay the groundwork of an encounter between Christian theology and the Chinese philosophy of Daoism which will furnish a new vantage point from which these areas of Christian thought can be reassessed and illuminated.

One final precautionary note is necessary regarding theoretical uniformity.  It cannot be assumed that any given culture can be summed up as a theoretical unit such as “Chinese philosophy” or even “Daoism.”  The closer one looks at the borders between one culture and the next, the blurrier the lines become.  Nevertheless, to avoid slipping into the paralysis of sheer relativism, suffice it to say that when terms such as “Chinese philosophy” or “Daoism” are used in this investigation, they should be understood in the most inclusive sense possible as dynamic traditions with their own internal diversity, and which cannot be reduced to any one particular articulation or manifestation.  Far from making dialogue impossible or fruitless, it is precisely this internal diversity and difference within a single tradition that makes possible the interaction with the differences and diversity within another tradition.

Part I: Understanding The Daodejing

Introduction 

The aim of this paper is to initiate a theological (if such a Christian term may be permitted) dialogue between Christianity and Daoism.  If this dialogue is to be of any real significance, then it must consider the dimension of praxis—the ethical implications of the texts and teachings.  The mutual ground on which Daoist-Christian dialogue must be founded lies in the commonalities and cross-fertilization of Daoist-Christian ethics.  Dialogue is only fruitful if both parties are enriched by the encounter with the other; it will call for a move from a Daoist ethic and a Christian ethic toward a Daoist-Christian ethic.  I will begin by considering the most primary and central texts for each tradition: the teachings of Laozi in the Daodejing (DDJ) and the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.  After a thematic analysis of the predominant ethical concepts and symbols in these texts will follow a reflection on the theological and ethical implications of the dialogue.  Finally, I will pose some concluding considerations for further comparison that is beyond the scope of this introductory dialogue.

Ancient China In Context

Before examining the content of the text it is critical to establish a basic understanding of its context. Understanding the full context from which the DDJ was written requires awareness of the religious and philosophical history of ancient China over as vast an expanse as that of the Judeo-Christian and Hellenistic historical backdrop for the New Testament.  In a rudimentary way, however, the relationship between Daoism and the dominant religion of ancient China—namely Confucianism—can be summarized as analogous to that of early Christianity and Judaism.  Each pair had a shared history of religious and philosophical concepts, symbols, and language, and both Christianity and Daoism grew out of a reinterpretation of their respective traditional contexts. Daoism crystallized during a period dominated by two opposing schools of thought: Confucianism and Mohism.  Both were structured ways or courses (dao) of action and behavior that were designed to cultivate certain skills and virtues (de).

The way that Confucian and Mohist texts used dao might best be translated as “guiding discourse.”  Once these practices were mastered and internalized, one would be said to have “attained” the course, and this attainment was called de (virtuosity or virtue).

Thus there were many daos, many ways or courses.  There was the Confucian dao which affirmed the goodness of human nature and venerated the family unit, and there was the Mohist dao which sought to cultivate all-inclusive love through calculating a utilitarian formula to ensure maximum benefit for all.

The movement which would later be called Daoism emerged in this context, articulating a new position associated with a benevolent sage called Laozi to whom the text of the Daodejing is attributed.  The significance of this text, according to Brook Ziporyn, is that it “marks a major break, indeed a deliberate 180-degree turnaround, from the understanding of dao found in the Confucian and Mohist schools, developing a new and profoundly different ironic meaning of the term dao.”

The Daoists perceived that the Confucian dao and the Mohist dao, though diametrically opposed to one another, were both equally flawed; both schools erroneously thought that their dao could be systematized and formulated in such a way, through rules and a legalistic mindset, that they could be made to cultivate the proper de.  For the Daoists, no amount of human striving through practices and adherence to rules could possibly cultivate true virtue, so they began using dao to mean the exact opposite of the traditional sense: the true Dao is what is free of purpose and specified guidelines.

Rather than prescribe yet another alternative dao to follow, the Daoists began to speak of the one eternal, ineffable, and unnameable Dao that is the way of nature and the whole cosmos.  Like the other daos, the Dao influences us by shaping our perceptions, desires, and behavior, but unlike any other dao, this Dao cannot be contained, understood, or followed by any human effort.  It is only through abandoning focus on human activity and conscious moral knowledge and reorienting oneself to the spontaneous and free guidance of nature that one might attain (de) this Dao. Thus, the DDJ begins to speak quite paradoxically about this Dao from the very first chapter: “A way that can be walked is not the Way.  A name that can be named is not the Name” (ch. 1).

In Chinese, dao can be translated as both the noun ‘way‘ and the verb ‘walk’ so the ironic sense of the Daoist wordplay immediately jumps into the foreground of these opening words: “A dao that can be daoed is not the Dao.”  This is a stark acknowledgement of the limited ability of language to express the full reality of what is being called Dao, which seems to suggest that this Dao transcends all thought and therefore cannot be spoken of; and yet the following eighty chapters go on to do just that.  This paradox-laden wordplay is the result of the extensive critique of legalism that is central to Daoism, and which certainly has its counterpart in Christian tradition.

Where other daos proscribed specific behaviors, Daoists laud the benefit of wu-wei (not-doing).  It is as if they left the entire Chinese philosophical system intact and simply turned it upside-down.  Perhaps the most subversive example of this is the way in which the DDJ lauds the female imagery of the Dao as mother and nurturer; the very characteristics for which women were marginalized in patriarchal Confucian society here become the prime examples of the Dao itself. Nevertheless, the Daoists shared essentially the same metaphysical and cosmological foundation as the Confucians and Mohists, rooted in a text so ancient it preceded all three movements.

Chinese Cosmology and Metaphysics

The earliest Chinese “classic” (Ching) revered as a religious and philosophical text is the I Ching, the “Book of Changes.”  The I Ching is based on a series of symbols that date back to 3000 B.C. and is considered to have been completed in its present form at the time Confucius added his commentaries on the symbols during the 5^th century B.C. It has belonged without question to the orthodox philosophical canon of China since the 2^nd century B.C.

The I Ching is the source of the metaphysical and cosmological presupposition that the most basic reality which is the ground of both existence and nonexistence is the principle of change.  The Chinese character for I (change) is comprised of the ancient symbols for ‘sun’ and ‘moon’—corresponding to the relation of yin and yang which characterizes the endless change all things undergo from days to moon cycles and on to the four seasons.

It is based on one of the world’s oldest natural theologies.  Ancient Chinese sages observed the interrelationships between all beings in the cosmos and discovered the universal principle that all of existence is in a perpetual process of change.  Thus, “Change is absolute and certain; only the principle of change never changes.”

Even though very different schools of thought eventually emerged from this starting point, they all share common ground in their ultimate goal: to achieve a harmonious balance and unity with the ever-changing natural world.  Only this harmony of interrelationship, this unity-in-diversity, could produce longevity and benefit for the whole cosmos; disharmony of the whole inevitably means disharmony for each individual being.  Though the Chinese disagreed about how best to achieve this harmony, they all held to this essentially holistic cosmology and inclusive logic.

The Starting point: Anthropology vs. Cosmology

The essential difference between Chinese and Western cosmology is their starting points.  As Lee observes, “While the West is interested in an anthropocentric approach to cosmology, East Asia is more interested in a cosmocentric approach to anthropology.”

While it may first appear to be minute, the difference has led to vastly different understandings of human nature.  In contrast to starting in anthropology, Chinese philosophy has negated the possibility of understanding the human being in isolation from the rest of the cosmos.  This leads to a relational worldview characterized by relativity; the human being can only be understood as a being in relation to the cosmos and all other beings.  Such a starting point renders the type of atomistic individualism endemic to American culture inconceivable.  By taking a cosmocentric view, Chinese philosophy is oriented toward inclusive and holistic ways of thinking, as opposed to the mutually exclusive and atomistic ways of thinking that result from either-or logic.  Thus, Korean-American theologian Jung Young Lee argues that “since everything changes, change itself is the most inclusive reality,” and a theology based on change “is a theology of fulfillment for all…it deals with the wholeness of cosmos and the totality of ecosystem in which human beings are a part.” In short, The essentially relational view of Chinese cosmology can lead us into a theology that is more holistic, ecumenical, and ecological, and thus better equip us to address the pressing issues of our time in a more relevant way.

East of Athens: Inclusive Both/And Logic

What sets Chinese thought in stark contrast to its Greek counterpart is its ultimate grounding in the metaphysics of change.  Greek thought was preoccupied with a static ontology that saw ‘being-itself’ and not ‘change-itself’ as the ultimate ground of reality, whereas for Hebrew thought, becoming is the most basic category. Western philosophy has scarcely moved beyond the Aristotelean either/or logic of the excluded middle.

This logic has been used “to maintain strict categorical distinctions regarding all issues and as a separatist tool to marginalize those who are different.” The problem is that either/or thinking inevitably lapses into an irreconcilable dualism resulting in many philosophical and theological problems that have gone unsolved for centuries.

While this exclusive, dualist logic can be a means of privileging the dominant central group to the exclusion and marginalization of others, inclusive both/and logic does not.  “In other words, exclusivist thinking excludes inclusivist thinking, but inclusivist thinking includes exclusivist thinking.”

As Robert Allinson demonstrates, the two great sages of Daoism—Laozi and Zhuangzi—like Wittgenstein did centuries later in the West, would deliberately use the “art of circumlocution” to expose the limits of language and the inherent flaw in either/or dualistic logic:

“We are using language to make distinctions where no distinctions are to be made. In this sense, as Wittgenstein, we leave everything as it is. We hide the world in the world, but not quite. We now understand that understanding takes place between the words. What we understand has no distinctions. Language makes distinctions where none are to be made. That which we understand has no dual nature, but when we put it into language, we have made subject and object of it. Its reality is not subject and object; but our mode of description is subject and object. We do not understand anything with subject–object language, but it is the only language that we know. What is reality is not divided up into subject and object, but we are forced to use the subject–object language to describe it.”

One reason that Laozi and Zhuangzi were able to get around these limits of language is that the ancient Chinese language functioned much differently than modern English.  It is a conceptual language formulated on pictorial representations without grammar. The original text of the DDJ seldom differentiates the subject and object and is not clearly divided into lines and sentences.

Due to the different, namely analytical character of modern English, much of this original openness of the Chinese text instantly vanishes in translation because English demands a subject-object distinction.  Nevertheless, even in translation one still gets the sense of thought transcending the limits of linguistic expression by way of allusion.  Laozi had no name for the Nameless, so he called it Dao; Jesus could not describe the Kingdom of God directly, so he compared it to a mustard seed.  In both cases language is made to express more than it really can, and in both cases, paradox is used to express a greater unity that lies just beyond the seeming contradiction.  In this way, the paradox becomes the emblem of the unifying character of both/and logic.

Because of the more flexible character of its original language, Chinese thought offers an extremely valuable alternative to exclusive either/or logic.  In both/and thought, opposites are seen as complementary and coexistent; there is no room for the enmity between the one and the other as in the logic of either/or—such logic is based on the flawed assumption that the one can exist in isolation.  In contrast, Laozi suggests,

Everyone recognizes beauty

only because of ugliness

Everyone recognizes virtue

only because of sin (ch. 2)

Logic of Relationality: Yin and Yang

Chinese both-and philosophy is based on the fundamental concept of change which produces yin and yang.  Yin and yang are complementary opposites; yin represents the passive principle that is receptive, dark, and empty whereas yang represents the active principle that is energetic, light, and overflowing.  The difference  between the ying-yang philosophy of opposites and Aristotelean either-or logic, however, is that they are seen as mutually interdependent and value neutral because both arise together only because of change.  They represent dark and light only in the more literal sense of the changes from day to night and vise versa; they never carry the same value-oriented sense that dark and light often do in Western thought in which dark represents the qualitatively evil and light represents the qualitatively good.  It would make no sense to say that yang is better than yin because in yin-yang thinking, both represent one reality.  Further, the symbol of the Great Ultimate, the metaphysical symbol of change (Figure 1), illustrates the mutual dependence of yin and yang as interpenetrating opposites-in-unionrather than as mutually exclusive and dualistic absolutes:

Figure 1.                  Symbol of the Great Ultimate

The dots in the symbol above represent the mutuality of the ying-yang relationship because there is yin (dark dot) in yang and yang (light dot) in yin; the two can never be fully separated and isolated because they exist together in the relationship of ultimate change (the whole circle).

The Way, Truth, and Life of Laozi

Though the true origin and authorship of the ancient text of the Daodejing is as fiercely debated and uncertain as that of many Christian texts, there are a few facts that are generally accepted as accurate: the present form of the text is not the singular work of the traditional author, Laozi, but is rather a collection and redaction of the wisdom and insights penned by generations of Chinese sages from the period between the 7^th and the 2^nd centuries B.C.

However, the legend of how the DDJ was written is perhaps just as revealing of the text’s nature and purpose:

During the time of Confucius (around 500 B.C.) Lao-tsu practiced Tao and Te (the Supreme Way and its Expression) and focused his teachings on humility and being nameless.  He was keeper of the royal archives in the state of Chou.  After he foresaw that the state would fall into decay, he packed his belongings and decided to leave through the Western gateway.  The gatekeeper, Yin-hsi, seeing that this great sage was about to leave the world said, “Master, you are about to renounce this world, please compose a book for me.”  Thereupon the “Old Master” came down from his oxcart, took out his pen and ink, and began to compose a book of two parts, discussing Tao and Te.  Several hours later, 

Lao-tsu handed the finished text of slightly more than five thousand characters to the gatekeeper and then departed toward the West.

The setting of the story and the identification of the text’s recipient as a “gatekeeper” symbolizes the fact that the text serves as a key to open up a new understanding.  The fact that Laozi “came down” from his oxcart to write the entire text in reply to a simple request demonstrates his humility, kindness and generosity.  Since he composed it entirely in one sitting, Laozi proves himself to be focused and one-pointed, and the fact that he was departing “toward the West” symbolizes the universality of his message and wisdom, which was intended to be shared with all people.

These traits attributed to the figure of Laozi represent those of the “Sage” spoken of throughout the text: humility, kindness, generousity, and openness to all people.  From these values emerges the teaching of a Way to live in harmony with the Dao and the universe by humbling the self and embracing all others.  It is based in the inclusive logic of both/and, which leads to a fundamentally holistic and relational view of the world.  Laozi’s Way is to live by a radically inclusive love, which denies selfishness in order to accept others.  It is to become marginal in order to embrace rather than dominate the marginalized and to embrace all so inclusively as to love even the enemy.

Part II: Conceptual Analysis and Comparison

Though the historical, cultural, and religious worlds of Laozi and Jesus were quite different from one another, what is truly striking and instructive is that there should be any similarity at all between the “way” that each taught and adhered to.  We have seen a minute degree of contextual similarity between the crystallization of Daoism and Christianity as both product of and reaction to their respective religious milieus, but what is truly astounding is the degree of similarity in the thematic content and ethical values of the two traditions.  Thus, the ideal place to initiate dialogue is the investigation of these themes and values.

The Sage and Paradoxical Reversals

The paradoxical reversal is by far the most commonly recurring theme in the DDJ.  This theme also resonates throughout the words of Jesus in the New Testament, for example, “So the last will be first, and the first last” (Mt. 20:8).

Similarly, Laozi uses these reversals to turn conventional morality and values upside-down:

The low is greater than the high

The still is greater than the restless

The low country wins over its neighbor

The still female wins over the male…

The Sage bows to the people

The people bow to the Sage (ch. 61)

When Laozi speaks of the “Sage” he is describing the qualities of the good leader in contrast to the values normally associated with leadership.  For Laozi, true power is in humility, not aggressive self-assertion.  This leads him to the paradoxical association of true leadership with servanthood.  In that same sense, Jesus said, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so among you…whoever wishes to become first among you must be slave of all” (Mk. 10:42-44).  Laozi echoes this thought:

He who wishes to rule over the people

must speak as if below them

He who wishes to lead the people

must walk as if behind them…

The Sage stays low

so the world never tires of exalting him

He remains a servant

so the world never tires of making him its king (ch. 66)

In the DDJ, the personal embodiment of the paradoxical reversal is the Sage.  The Sage (sheng jen) refers literally to a “holy person” and the symbolic meaning of the two characters “suggests a direct hearing, without interference, between the holy man and the Absolute.  The holy man hears the pure voice of Tao; the holy man acts in perfect harmony with the universe.”

The ultimate question for Daoist-Christian dialogue thus emerges: what is the relation between the Sage of the DDJ and Jesus Christ?

St. Paul speaks of the κενωσις (emptying) of Jesus in his epistle to the Philippians: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave…Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him a name above every name” (2:5-9).  Laozi, when contemplating the truth of the ancient saying, “Surrender brings perfection,” says this about the Sage:

So the Sage embraces the One

and becomes a model for the world

Without showing himself, he shines forth

Without promoting himself, he is distinguished

Without claiming reward, he gains endless merit

Without seeking glory, his glory endures (ch. 22)

According to Laozi, the Sage rules with true power, which is peaceful and not coercive; this is what sets him/her apart from all others.  Because of the Sage’s extreme humility and self-sacrifice, s/he possesses this power,

that guides without forcing

that serves without seeking

that brings forth and sustains life (ch. 10)

Laozi goes on to say that whoever has this power “brings Tao to this very Earth” and that although “he can triumph over a raging fire,” he nevertheless will come to rule the world “with the gentleness of a feather” (ch. 10).  The metaphor Laozi uses for this gentle power is that of water, which despite being the most soft and yielding thing on earth, patiently erodes deep canyons and valleys to profoundly change the landscape (ch. 78).

In this ultimate example of reversal, what appears to be unshakably hard and unchanging (rock) is completely overcome by the power of what appears to be the most innocuously soft and yielding (water).  Given these observations about the upside-down values associated with Jesus and the Sage, the next step is to consider their ethical implications for disciples.

Wu-Wei and Non-Resistance: Ethical Considerations

The central ethical model in the DDJ is the concept of wu-wei, which is translated as inaction, non-action, non-coercion, or acting naturally—none of which encapsulates the full sense of wu-wei as Laozi uses the phrase.

It first appears in ch. 2 of the DDJ along with the first appearance of sheng jen (Sage), who “acts without acting and teaches without talking.”  The emphasis of this wordless teaching is that it is a teaching carried out in deed—it can only be enacted and imitated.

This calls to mind the old Christian adage, “Preach the gospel always, and if necessary, use words.”  It underscores the inseparability of Tao-logos and Tao-praxis, word and deed.  The primary danger in interpreting and enacting the ethic of wu-wei lies in the ease with which “act without acting” can be taken to mean “do nothing.”  The true sense of what is meant by wu-wei can only be understood as the symbolic power of water mentioned above. Lee uses the example of ripples moving out from the center of a pond toward the margins, the shore, and then returning to create more powerful waves.  “What made the margin powerful was not its reaction but its inaction…marginality uses reception rather than dominance to change the world.”

Non-action, in this sense, cannot mean “remain indifferent to injustice.”  Its true meaning is that the only way to properly overcome the rock of injustice is through the gentle, patient, but persevering power of water eroding canyons and valleys.  Resisting the impulse to react to injustice, wu-wei calls for embracing love as a response to it.  Thus, “Tao-praxis exercises true strength, not violent power, to change evil at a deeply personal as well as societal level,” and does so by challenging “the sin, offenses, and wrongs committed by offenders through integrity, kindness, gentleness, and persistence.”

The greatest and truest power (de) comes from the attainment of the Dao through wu-wei—that is, this power is only available to the one who does not seek power and does not use force.

In a way, wu-wei is simply being natural by yielding to the natural way of things (ziran) that is the very root of the Dao.  Yet there is a paradox: if it truly is natural and effortless, then why should we need to formulate the concept?  Underlying this paradox is the insight that somehow for humans, being natural does not come naturally.

Here, wu-wei can shed light on the relationship between grace and works in Christianity.  Wu-wei, like grace, is a way of giving up our striving for perfection by giving in to the Dao/God, which then acts through us and naturally yields the fruits of the Spirit.

There can be no striving for the fruits of the Spirit, and the works of the Spirit in and through us can never be forced; only by yielding to the Spirit, doing nothing on our own, and not expecting a reward do the fruits manifest.  Thus, Paul says, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).  Laozi seems to be getting close to Paul’s tension between grace and legalism:

When the greatness of Tao is present

action arises from one’s own heart

When the greatness of Tao is absent

action comes from the rules

of “kindness” and “justice”

If you need rules to be kind and just,

if you act virtuous,

this is a sure sign that virtue is absent

Thus we see the great hypocrisy (ch. 18)

The Christian ethical doctrine of non-resistance is also similar to the concept of wu-wei both in terms of its value for guiding ethical behavior and in its potential to be misinterpreted and thereby lost.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Mt. 5:39).  The danger here lies in interpreting this as a command to tacitly endure abuse and violence, and even worse, to willfully seek it out.  Instead, as the water metaphor above helped to elucidate, Jesus is advocating a way to “act without acting” or to “resist without resisting.”  Rather than to resist evil in such a way as to transfer the same abuses and violence on the perpetrator, Jesus is pointing toward a way of resistance that does away with all violence and abuse.  Thus, he goes on to say, “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt. 5:44).  Paradoxically, the only viable reply to the hatred and injustice of the world is to respond with unconditional love and generosity.  Non-resistance and wu-wei can both be understood as ways of acting without expecting to be rewarded, because both are founded on the idea of selfless love.  As Laozi summarizes, “Love vanquishes all attackers” (ch. 67).  Although the truth expressed here by Jesus and Laozi seems to be paradoxical, Motlmann eloquently suggests that “it only sounds paradoxical in a perverse, untrue world of injustice and violence directed against human beings and against the earth.”

Love and Generosity 

While love is quite explicitly central to the teachings of Jesus and the Christian understanding of the life of discipleship, the role love plays in the DDJ is more subtle—to the point that many readers and interpreters of the DDJ miss it entirely.  To understand how love functions in the DDJ, it has to be seen in connection to the other values that predominate in the text.  Laozi says,

I have three treasures that I cherish and hold dear

the first is love

the second is moderation

the third is humility

With love one is fearless

With moderation one is abundant

With humility one can fill the highest position

Now if one is fearless but has no love

abundant but has no moderation

rises up but has no humility

Surely he is doomed (ch. 67)

First, Laozi explicitly states that love is the most primary of his most cherished “treasures.”  Then he illustrates how love is interwoven with the other two treasures of moderation and humility.  All three of these treasures are embodied by the Sage, who “sees everything as his own self” and thus “loves everyone as his own child” (ch. 49).  Since this love is unconditional and makes no distinctions, it reflects the character of the Dao.  Likewise, the Sage “treats with goodness” both those who are good and those who are bad, “because the nature of his being is good” (ch. 49).  True goodness, like true love, does not make any distinction and thus reflects the character of the Dao. Goodness manifests in humility, as seen above, as well as in generosity.  Laozi says that, “A knower of the Truth…gives without keeping an account,” because s/he understands the underlying truth that “giving and receiving are one” (ch. 27).  In this way, generosity also reflects the Dao which is both “the mother of the universe” which gives all things their existence, as well as “that to which all things return” (ch. 25).

Jesus makes a similar connection between the character of God and the ethical mandate to practice God’s love, humility, and generosity.  Luke’s account summarizes this well, “But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.  Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Lk. 6:35).  Like the nature of the Dao and the actions of the Sage, here we see that God’s love and generosity make no distinction.  Seeing all as one, the striving for virtue fades and the fruits of the Spirit begin to appear:

To give without seeking reward

To help without thinking it is virtuous—

therein lies great virtue…

The highest virtue is to act without a sense of self

The highest kindness is to give without condition

The highest justice is to see without preference (ch. 38)

Such traits are evidence of the dao of the Dao; the way of the Way.  They are the external signs of an internal reality that precedes them.  Only because of the Spirit’s presence can the fruits begin to show.  The internal reality is self-emptying and all-embracing.

The One

We have seen that the nature of Dao and God is characterizes by love and generosity that make no distinctions.  What emerges is a sense of oneness in which the narrow preoccupation with the self is transcended by the greater truth of the self in relation to others.  Oneness is essentially what makes life possible.  Consider the example of an ecosystem

—it is only because each individual species is able to fit together in mutual relation as one ecosystem that each can live at all.  Thus, Laozi is correct in a very literal sense when he says that without the One, “all things would go lifelessly upon this earth” (ch. 39).  It is a holistic way of viewing all of creation through interrelationship:

By realizing the One

kings and lords become instruments of peace

and all creatures live joyfully upon this earth (ch. 39)

Yet this is unity in diversity, not a mystical union in which all the particulars are dissolved into the undifferentiated whole.  Rather, each part, though distinct, only finds meaning because of the whole:

The pieces of a chariot are useless

unless they work in accordance with the whole

A man’s life brings nothing

unless he lives in accordance with the whole universe

Playing one’s part

in accordance with the universe

is true humility…

If you accept your part with humility

the glory of the universe will be yours (ch. 39)

The Bible does give voice to a view comparable to this profound sense of the oneness and interdependence of all creation, and such passages have been foundational for eco-theology and other theologies that take seriously the relationship between humanity and nature.  Unfortunately, however, this voice is easily drowned out by the loudness with which these words of God ring out throughout Christian history: “fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over…every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28).  The way in which the DDJ foregrounds the need for a harmonious coexistence between humans and nature makes it a valuable hermeneutical lens with which we can recover the marginalized voices of the biblical text, lifting them from their silence and obscurity.

Part III: Implications for Christian Theology

Christian ethics demands a life of following Jesus in both word and deed.  While Christian theology certainly has adequate language for understanding the former, its understanding of the latter has been lacking.  Thanks to the prologue in the gospel of John, christology has been able to identify the eternal Word (λογος) with Christ.  What the encounter with Daoism offers is an equally viable way of understanding Christ as the Way (Dao) precisely in the ethical sense—the ability to understand Christ and discipleship in terms of both word and deed.  This move does not require any kind of harmful syncretism or careless appropriation and assimilation of another religion’s concepts; the work has already been done.  The Dao has already come into the midst of the Christian community because the Chinese New Testament uses the dao to translate the word λογος in the prologue of John.

It is because Chinese Christians have already benefited from the understanding of Christ that is facilitated by the usage of Dao that the concept can now be extended to the Christian community at large.  The Dao cannot remain confined to Chinese contextual theology for Chinese Christians alone, because every contextual theology is at once also directed to the whole community.

Of course, the notion of the “Way” has been a part of Christian tradition since long before the Bible was translated into Chinese.  McCasland’s careful reading of the book of Acts reveals “that Way as a name for Christianity is at least as old as Church.”

In fact, the concept of the way or path is a nearly universal human phenomenon found in nearly every world culture, philosophy and religion.

It is a metaphor that enables us to make sense of something abstract and difficult to understand (like God, and the meaning of life) by making reference to something concrete and readily comprehensible.

The benefit of such a metaphor is its ability to address us ethically because at the core, bodies are what are on paths.

Such an embodied concept helps us move beyond the body-spirit dualism that has long haunted Western thought and led to the denigration of the body.  Instead, what is offered is the restoration of both body and mind into proper harmony as we move along the Way.

Personal vs. Impersonal 

As Moltmann suggests, Western Christians will be tempted to ask whether the Dao is either personal or impersonal in order to see whether or not the Dao is comparable to a personal God.

The question misses the point because it fails to see that the Dao is beyond personhood and is therefore neither personal nor impersonal.  Christian theology in the west has followed Greek philosophy in trying to understand God in terms of Being, and fails at this point to grasp the Dao that is both being and non-being.  Since Christians have found that the essence of Being is impossible to grasp or contain with any human thought our concept, all our names for God derive from God’s actions as we experience them (not from God’s essence).

Thus, “All human utterances about God are no more than analogies.”

On the other hand, Moltmann argues,

The non-being being, the nameless name and the unutterable utterance of Tao is fundamentally speaking more consistent than the category of analogy, which mediates between similarity and dissimilarity, for Taoism binds together contradiction and correspondence—indeed actually brings correspondence about through contradiction.

What confronts us at first sight is the fundamental difference between the concept of a more-than-personal Dao as elucidated by Laozi, and the conventional Christian concept of the personal God.  In spite of the obvious foundations for conceiving of Jesus’ “Abba” God as a deeply personal deity, however, the Christian tradition has still affirmed that God is also beyond just a personal being.  Yet the dominating metaphor for God in Christianity is still that of the personal Father figure which drastically overshadows any imagery (or non-imagery) of the sense in which God is more than personal.  It is at this juncture that the dialogue with the Dao concept is particularly fruitful, for with it Laozi supplies us with a way of conceiving of Dao/God; as both personal and non-personal or supra-personal.

Male vs. Female

Another way in which the dialogue with Daoism confronts and challenges Christian theology is the question of gender.  In Christianity, it is the male image of God the Father that has dominated to such an extent that God has come to be viewed by many, if not most Christians, as exclusively male.  Here again the Daoist understanding supplements the imagery of a male God who “created” with that of the mother who “gives birth” to all things.

As Moltmann correctly points out, the feminine imagery of the DDJ is an integral aspect of the Daoist understanding that “the life-giving power sustains the living, but does not dominate it.”

Thus, through dialogue we gain a vital resource that challenges us to question the gender associations in our theological language.  We also gain a new hermeneutic that questions imagery of domination as opposed to imagery of nurture and sustenance.

Creation vs. Evolution

The significance of this Daoist imagery reaches beyond gender issues alone.  While the image of the mother is certainly a beneficial complement to that of the father, the motherly concept of life-sustaining is also an important complement to the conventional Christian understanding of creation “in the beginning.”  It helps us to reinterpret “in the beginning” outside of a static view of the world so that we can learn afresh that God is not the proverbial “watchmaker” but that God is at work here and now.  As the dialogue with Daoism begins to push Christianity toward a more dynamic view of the world, the doctrine of creation is dusted off from the shelf of “in the beginning” and is reinterpreted in terms of God’s ongoing creative activity as intimately bound up with God’s work of reconciliation.  Perhaps then Christians will begin to find the vocabulary to address the evolutionary worldview of modern science so that both can engage in a mutually enriching dialogue.  When Christians and scientists engage in this way, they can move from the stale dichotomy of either creation or evolution to a greater understanding and greater unity.

Conclusion

End vs. Beginning

Finally, the Daoist perspective allows us to speak not only of salvation of humanity, as we have traditionally tended to do, but also of the salvation of all creation.  The schism between the Christian doctrines of creation and soteriology are reunited and reconciled to one another in the inclusive concept of ongoing creation.  Here the dynamic unfolding of God’s creative work is also seen as the source of our hope in the transformation of this fallen order and the harmonious one that is to come.  The primary rooting of theology in cosmology rather than anthropology helps us to locate the Kingdom of God in cosmic harmony, which is inclusive of, but not reducible to anthropological harmony; the pouring of the spirit on all creation (which in Joel is explicitly connected to the non-human creatures such as animals and even the very soil) and not just on all humans is in view.  Thus, even though it has often been neglected and forgotten, this inclusive cosmology of the DDJ is in many respects quite close to biblical cosmology.  Far from being harmfully syncretistic, the dialogue with the texts of Daoism proves to be a helpful spotlight for illuminating aspects of Biblical theology which have often passed into the shadowy background of Christian theology.  It will force us to look at our own text from a new vantage point which can only enable us to discern the truth of the Word of God in greater depth.

The End Is the Beginning

Since all dialogue involves taking part in an essentially open-ended conversation, there is no ending.  Instead, there is a time to pause for reflection and contemplation of where the conversation has taken us and where it might take us in the future.  The preceding study has barely begun to etch a mark into the vast blank slate of Daoist-Christian dialogue.  What has begun to emerge, however, is the sense that Jesus and Laozi are not bringing us a new religion to follow, but a new Way of living together in community, of respecting our interconnectedness with the universe, and of abiding in infinite, undifferentiated love.

Bibliography

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Moltmann, Jürgen.  “TAO – The Chinese Mystery of the World: Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching Read with Western Eyes,” In Science and Wisdom. trans. Margaret Kohl Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Park, Andrew Sung. “A Theology of the Way (Tao),” Interpretation 55, no. 4 (October 2001): 389-399.

Wei, Henry. The Authentic I Ching: A New Translation. North Hollywood, CA: Newcastle, 1987.

Ziporyn, Brook. Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009.

Additional Resources

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Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. Trinity and Religious Pluralism. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004.

Kim, Heup Young. “A Tao of Interreligious Dialogue in an Age of Globalization: An East Asian Christian Perspective.” Political Theology 6, no. 4 (2005): 487-499.

Lee, Pauline C. “Engaging Comparative Religion: A Redescription of the Lunyu, the Zhuangzi, and “A Place on Which to Stand”.” Journal of Chinese Religions 35 (2007): 98-133.

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Masuzawa, Tomoko. “Reader as Producer: Jonathan Z. Smith on Exegesis, Ingenuity, Elaboration.” In Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, 311-339. London: Equinox, 2008.

Moore, Stephen D. Post Structuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.

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Park, Ynhui. “The Concept of Tao: A Hermeneutical Perspective.” Vol. 17. In Phenomenology of Life in a Dialogue Between Chinese and Occidental Philosophy, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 203-213. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984.

Robinson, Gnana. “‘Mission in Christ’s Way’: The Way of Which Christ?.” Exchange 35, no. 3 (2006): 270-277.

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Culpepper and Rolf Rendtorff, New York: E.J. Brill, 1994.

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Appendix

Partial Concordance of Daodejing References by Theme and Chapter

Femininity: 1, 6, 10, 20, 25, 30, 52, 59, 61

Paradoxical Reversals: 2, 5, 7, 13, 27, 31, 34, 38, 44, 48, 49, 51, 57, 73, 77, 79, 81

Being Natural: 3, 8, 17, 19, 29, 31-32, 38, 46, 68, 72

Nature: 8, 15, 23, 29, 30-31, 65, 76

Contentment: 3, 29, 33, 44, 46, 79, 80

Selflessness: 3, 9, 24, 27, 38, 41, 66, 72

Harmony: 3, 31, 32, 37, 39, 49, 54-55, 60, 69

Love: 13, 16, 28, 38, 49, 61-62, 67, 72

Sage: 10, 22, 23, 27, 30, 34, 49, 58, 61, 66, 72

Water: 8, 15, 32, 34-35, 45, 61, 78

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Ecolesiology—The Ecological, Ecumenical, and Economic House of God: A Perspective on Reconciliation

November 18, 2010

Introduction

The Christian themes of sanctification and reconciliation and their connection to the community life of the church are so integral and interconnected that they must be examined holistically; otherwise there is a tremendous risk of losing the core of these important teachings.  The individualization and spiritualization of the “holy” since the dawn of modernity, spawned by the so-called Enlightenment, has systematically purged it of its originally holistic, sacred community-centered orientation, which has led to the divorce of holy living from the so-called secular aspects of daily life.

This, in turn, has led to a mode of “ghettoized” Christian existence in North America and Europe that has sanctioned the emerging culture of consumption.

Cut off from the ability to critique the pitfalls of consumerism, the church has allowed itself to become another venue, or market of consumerism.  What needs to be addressed, beyond the obvious fact that over-consumption is destructive of the environment, is that “persistent and obsessive consumption is no longer merely a habit; instead, it is an addiction which rests on a foundation which functions as the equivalent of a religion.”

As such, it should be perceived as a threat not only to the ecosystem, but also to the Christian faith; it is, in short, the idolatry of our time.  Just as our toxic chemicals and industrial wastes pollute our air and water, causing sickness and death to animals and humans all over the world, so too the lies of consumerism seep into the aquifers of Christian spirituality and pollute our ways of reading and enacting the word of God.  How has this crisis come to be, and what can be done to reclaim our threatened faith?

Diagnosis: An Ecological, Economic, and Ecumenical Crisis

The ecological crisis, as it pertains to Christian faith, is rooted in the tendency in Western theology to emphasize the transcendent aspects of God and neglect the immanence of God.

When carried out to its logical end, this position leads to a view of the created world as a profane secularized realm of “resources” for human use, and to an otherworldly view of God’s redemption that only concerns humans.  This world, so the logic goes, is neither God’s true home, nor our own, but is merely the stage of the divine redemption of humanity and the forsaken arena from which humans will be liberated.

The industrial and technological plundering of the earth’s resources, however, “does not produce benefits for all societies but only for those that control…production, and it excludes others or grants them information by exacting heavy tribute (royalties).”

In other words, there is a direct link between the ecological exploitation that violates the earth and the economic exploitation that creates and increases the inequality between the rich and the poor.  Behind the modern myth of progress and infinite economic growth lies the truth that the only thing such a system is guaranteed to “grow” is inequality.

This is why Leonardo Boff and many other Latin American liberation theologians have increasingly taken notice of the inextricable link between ecological and economic liberation, doing so within the context of the doctrine of creation.  Yet the very fact that we so label theologians “Latin American” and “liberation”, among many others, elucidates the fact that the church in the West has tended to emphasize the Western view of God as all-encompassing, bracketing off other sources of theology as “contextual” theologies; in sum, the crisis can also be seen as an ecumenical one.  Only recently has the need for Western Christians to hear and be challenged by the prophetic and critical voices of other Christian traditions begun to be acknowledged.

Christians in the West are only now beginning to recognize that the biblical account depicts a deity who is both transcendent and immanent, and that the need to emphasize the latter aspect is crucial if the church wishes to be able to address the evils of our time.  We proclaim the trinitarian God who brought the world into being through God’s Word, who breathed life into all creatures by the Spirit which is none other than the personal presence of Godself in creation, and whose Wisdom and Word was made flesh in order to walk this earth alongside us so as to reconcile all of God’s creation—including, but certainly not limited to human beings (Col 1:20).  Therefore, we affirm with the apostle Paul, that God “is actually not far from us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27-28).

We proclaim Emmanuel, God with us, and confess that it is God’s ruach, the breath and Spirit of life that is in us, and which sustains us; for we are reduced to dust when it departs (Ps. 104).

The remedy for Christian faith in the West is to replace the doctrine of creation that ignores everything but the phrase, “fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion” (Gen 1:28) with a more holistic, and ultimately more biblical doctrine of creation.  The purpose of this paper is to explore this doctrine as it plays out in the ancient metaphor of the oikos, the household of God.  The story of the oikos begins with the original harmony of the Architect’s creation, and unfolds in three spheres that have oikos as their etymological root: the ecological, the economic, and ecumenical, which is the consummated, holistic reconciliation of economics and ecology.  The story will correspondingly trace the human roles in the household from gardener and sustainer, to perpetrator and victim of domestic violence, to domestic servant, and finally to family member.  Only with a proper understanding of the ways of human sinfulness and the nature of the relationships that have been violated can the nature of the church as God’s oikos community of reconciliation begin to be understood.

Part I: The Ecological House and the Sin of Autonomy

The word ecology was coined in 1866 by the German Darwinian Ernst Haeckel from the Greek word oikos, meaning house, to refer literally to the household of living creatures on earth and their interwoven, interdependent community existence.

Wilderness ecologist Aldo Leopold once said, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may being to use it with love and respect.”

Thus, we see that the underlying premise of the science of ecology, despite its basis in evolutionary biology rather than creation theology, is very close to the central emphasis of cosmology in the Jewish and Christian scriptures: God’s creation is fundamentally relational.

Biblically, the primeval home of the human being is characterized as an ecologically harmonious garden. We are also told that the human tenants of the garden violated its relational community and were expelled from it, and from that we infer that ecological relationships are significant and are in need of reconciliation.

All practices that dominate and exploit nature and other human beings are reenactments of taking from the Forbidden Tree (Gen 2:15-17), for “abuse and misuse of power are rooted in the desire to be like God” who is characterized in the industrial West as “a dominating, self-centered being with unlimited power.”

The need to respect the strictures of the Forbidden Tree out of reverence for life and respect for others, which seems weak and foolish to the powers of this world, reflects precisely the foolishness of the way of Christ which we profess to be God’s wisdom (1 Cor 1:21-25).  According to this story, the grasp for autonomy and the emphasis on the individual over the communal are sinful and destructive acts of domestic violence.

The book of Psalms is full of imagery of God’s house depicting the created world as the place in which God dwells with and among God’s people and in which he gives and sustains life.

The Hebrew scriptures depict a God who is intimately involved in the life and redemption of all creatures.  Both man and beast, we are told, “feast on the abundance of [God’s] house, and [God] give[s] them drink from the river of [God’s] delights” (Ps 35:8).  The whole earth—humans, other creatures, and the land itself—is seen as the victim of human iniquity (Mic. 7:13, Joel 1) and it cries out in despair for God’s redemption and the pouring out of the life-giving Spirit upon it (Joel 2:21-29).  All of creation, declares Paul in the first century, is groaning with labor pains in expectation of this consummate reconciliation (Rom. 8:22).  It is thus impossible, biblically speaking, to conceive of sanctification and reconciliation that does not pertain to the entire household of ecological relationships which were ordained by God and called good, and subsequently violated and destroyed by human acts of self-indulgent autonomy.

Part II: House Economics and the Sin of Theft

We have already seen that the ecological aspect of the household implies humanity’s limitation; there is no room for autonomy in a web of interdependent relationships.  Where ecology refers to these interrelationships, economics refers to the proper ordering of these relationships; it is what sustains the delicate balance of the community of creation.

Obviously, the first part of the word economy comes from the same Greek word, oikos.  The second part comes from nomos which refers to laws or regulations.

To speak of God’s economy is to assert faith in the fact that God has ordered creation in such a way that all creatures can be sustained through the proper relationships of ecology.  It implies that each creature has its own proper place and that the earth can provide no more and no less than what each creature needs to live.  Jesus spoke of God’s economy by saying, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Mt. 6:26).  It is important to note Jesus’ contrast between what the birds do in God’s economy and the obviously human activities of sowing, reaping and especially gathering into barns.  In Luke 12, Jesus speaks of a rich man who stores a surplus of food in an extra storehouse that he built because of his perceived need for security; what this man was not prepared for was the fact of his death.  This man’s sin, as Wendell Barry poignantly explicates, is theft, because “by laying up ‘much goods’ in the present…we incur a debt to the future that we cannot repay.  That is, we diminish the future by deeds we call ‘use’ but which the future will call ‘theft.’”

This passage thus ties Jesus’ command to seek first the kingdom of God with our economic behavior.  By taking more than our proper share we are committing theft and violating our relationships; our relationships are always both ecological and economic.

A second dimension of these passages, is that there is a difference between the human economy, as alluded to by the sowing and reaping activities, and the ecological economy in which the birds are fed by God.  The human economy, however, fits inside of and is wholly dependent on the larger ecological community. When we pretend our economy is not contingent in this way, we are guilty of domestic violence, because the human economy deals with materials and forces that we did not and cannot create–the fertility of the soil, the precipitation that irrigates the soil, and even the human productivity and ingenuity that is commodified as labor.

We cannot create systems of abstract, monetary value that are not entirely dependent on and derived from the only real ecological value: life.  Only God’s Spirit can breath this value into existence and it is thus a sacred value.

In Barry’s words, the problem is that the human industrial economy “sees itself as the only economy.  It makes itself thus exclusive by the simple expedient of valuing only what it can use.”

However, once we acknowledge God’s economy, “we are astonished and frightened to see how much modern enterprise is the work of hubris” and that it thus “is based on invasion and pillage of the Great Economy,” Barry’s word for God’s economy.

Furthermore, the reliance on technology and industry to solve the problems they create renders it a fruitless enterprise plagued by the need to result to mechanical solutions that can only operate by oversimplifying problems.  Since all of creation is God’s house, we have nowhere to dwell but in God’s economy, and thus, “whether or not we know that and act accordingly is the critical question, not about economy merely but about human life itself.”

This awareness can only be cultivated out of the recognition that we are embodied residents of the created natural world and as such we are unavoidably a part of God’s ecological economy; without such an awareness, our entire understanding of God’s house is reduced to the “environment” and the “economy” and both are confined to the sphere of other “social issues” as opposed to the spiritual issues which are the supposed concern of God and the church.

Poverty, when understood biblically, is neither solely a material condition nor simply a spiritual condition; it is both.  In Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus addresses the “poor in spirit” (Mt. 5:3), but in Luke he merely says, “Blessed are you who are poor” (Lk 6:20).  Similarly, economic sinfulness is neither solely a violation of God nor merely a violation of human beings; it is both.  Thus, when Jesus ‘cleanses the temple’ in Mark 11 he is committing a prophetic act that is both a religious and economic statement, and this is further evidenced by the two prophecies he quotes: the first is a statement by God about the nature of God’s house and who it is for—”a house of prayer for all nations” (Is. 56:7)—and the second deals specifically with how humans have profaned God’s house by making it “a den of thieves” (Jer. 7:11).  We might ask, in what way was God’s house made a den of thieves?  Of course, we only need to turn to Jeremiah 7:5-10 to discover the reason: the people do not execute justice with one another but instead they “oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood” (vv 6-7) and God refuses to allow the doers of such domestic violence to dwell in God’s house, so God asks, “Will you…then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered!—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house…become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it” (vv 9-11).  The sheer volume of prophetic writings pertaining to the indivisibility of executing justice and worshipping God make it impossible to drown out the biblical cries of the poor and oppressed.

Honoring God is inseparable from executing justice, the right ordering of relationships in God’s house (oikonomia or economy) and in the context of relationships, economic justice and ecological justice are also implicitly inseparable.

Part III: Ecological, Ecumenical and Economic Reconciliation

Now that we have begun to view the crisis holistically within the paradigm of God’s house we can begin to glimpse what is implied by the term reconciliation.  Etymologically, the word reconcile comes from Latin and means “to bring back together.”  It is a bringing back together that is ecological (relationships), economic (order), and also fundamentally ecumenical (holistic).  We have seen the ways in which humans have engaged in domestic violence against God’s house by pillaging it and tearing it down; reconciliation, in this sense, is the Architect’s plan of restoring the house to its intended form—both its material foundation and its family relationships.  It is not uncommon to hear the church called God’s house in Christian circles, but what is significant is that the imagery of God’s house in scripture is not of brick and mortar (Is. 66:1) but it is rather imagery of living flesh: the Body of Christ.  It is after building this embodied image of the church that Paul goes on to mix in the imagery of God’s house:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.  In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (Eph. 2:19-22).

The language of Paul depicts human beings, we who commit domestic violence and theft and property destruction in God’s house, as being brought back (reconciled) into the household.  More than that, these humans are now being called family members who serve as a “dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”  In the reconciliation through which God is bringing us back, the relationship between humanity and God is mended mutually; we are allowed back into the house as family members, while at the very same time, we are opening up to allow the Spirit of God to dwell in us!  But what can this mutual indwelling possibly mean?  How can this help us to understand the nature of the church and to find our place in the midst God’s project of reconciliation?  What does this have to do with the ecological, economic and ecumenical life of the church?

To understand all this, it must be remembered that the same trait is at the very core of the biblical imagery for God, creation, human beings, Jesus Christ, and the church: they are all alive.  According to Jürgen Moltmann, we have failed to understand the role of the church in the missio Dei and reconciliation because we have fundamentally misunderstood the mission of Christ: “Jesus didn’t bring a new religion into the world.  What he brought was new life.”

He argues that the Gospel of John quite explicitly states what God has brought into the world through Jesus Christ: life (Jn. 14:19), and in the Synoptic Gospels, he says, “Where Jesus is, there is life…sick people are healed, sad people are comforted, marginalized people are accepted, and the demons of death are driven out.”

The salvific work of the Holy Spirit in reconciliation cannot be confined merely to the spheres of religion and spirituality because it is the integrating redemption of the whole of life.  Reconciliation does not mean leaving this life to enter into eternal life; it is the breaking in of eternal life for the transformation of this life.

Thus, the apostle Paul writes, “For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality…then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:53-55).  Salvation is the process in which all things are reconciled through Christ which begins with the renewal of God’s people, then the renewal of all the living, and then is finally consummated with the renewal of the earth (Joel 2:21-29).  According to the bible, the signal of the Spirit’s presence is vitality and the true end of history is completion of God’s ecology wherein all relationships are indwelled by the Spirit and taken into the community of the triune God.

The church fits into this process as a living community that is also a community of life.  It is not insignificant that the ‘theology of life’ is now a source of ecumenical hope for the church, as it has been emphasized by Pope John Paul II, the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, the Korean theologian Chung Hyung Kyung, the German protestant Moltmann, and many others from divergent Christian traditions.

These thinkers are calling for the church to be the community of God’s people who work to support a ‘culture of life’ and who denounce the destructive powers of death.  In this sense, it is an ecological church, because the premise of ecology is that life is community.  This communal character reflects the communal character of God revealed in the doctrine of the Trinity.

Biblical descriptions of the experience of the Spirit are often feminine, such as that of being ‘born anew’ or of the Paraclete who comforts as a mother comforts (Jn. 14:26).  Thus, many Christians outside the clutches of patriarchal Rome (such as Syria) have come to view the Holy Spirit as the divine mother.

The benefit of this image for the context of the oikos is that it helps us to see the divine-human community of the church: our father is the Father of Christ, our mother is the life-giving Spirit of God, and the Son of the living God is our brother.  As a human community, then, we are a community of brothers and sisters in fellowship with our true Mother and Father.

Finally, as a church that exists within an insatiable human economy in which there is never enough, we are called to be a community that confesses the good news of God’s economy: there is enough.  Those of us who come into the church from places of privilege humbly admit that God is the liberator of the poor, oppressed, marginal, and downtrodden.  Those who come into the church from a position of material poverty must also admit that spiritual poverty is also a very real affliction.  For those of us who are wealthy, we must recognize that most of the wealthy people who come to Jesus in the Gospels found him to be too difficult to follow.  There is, however, one counterexample which we are challenged to follow: Zacchaeus, who gave half of everything he owned to the poor and paid back everything he took fourfold (Lk. 19:1-10).  Zacchaeus was committed to reconciliation and accordingly worked very hard to restore the relationships he had violated and broken.

In God’s economy, money is not in itself good or evil; what matters is justice and community.  In the New Testament picture of God’s community of the church, there are both rich and poor members, but what is important is that they are nevertheless a community of equals who are dedicated to sharing with one another and meeting the needs of the community (Jm. 5, Act. 4).  In fact, it is precisely this kind of diversity—the rich and poor communing together—that is essential to how God’s economy works.  It is precisely by bringing the rich and the poor together into relationships that the resources of the rich can be directed to meet the needs of the poor–both spiritually and materially.  That is because “the opposite of poverty is not property.  The opposite of both poverty and property is community.”

Conclusion: Homecoming

The household of God is the community that is marked by the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7).  This community’s vocation within the holistic project of God’s reconciliation is to be the people who have returned home to the house of our true Father.  In this oikos, we have all been the prodigal sons and daughters who return from estrangement glad even to be readmitted into our Father’s house as domestic servants but unimaginably surprised by the grace of being accepted warmly and lovingly, though certainly undeservingly, as sons and daughters (Lk. 15:11-32).

Our challenge, however, is to remember this as we call all our other long lost siblings back into the household, lest we should be like the brother in the parable and start to hate our returning brothers and sisters out of entitlement and jealousy.  We know that as the family grows, it will also change in ways that may make us uncomfortable.  Where these attitudes of fear, insecurity, and self-preservation surface in the community, they will be corrected by an affirmation of the good news of God’s economy: there is enough for everyone!  Then and only then will we be equipped for our role in reconciliation: to continue the homecoming by welcoming all who will enter into God’s ecological and ecumenical household.

Bibliography

Barry, Wendell. “Two Economies.” Review & Expositor 81, no. 2 (1984): 209-223.

Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Translated by Phillip Berryman. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997.

Conradie, Ernst M. “The Whole Household of God (Oikos): Some Ecclesiological Perspectives.” Scriptura 94 (2007): 1-9.

Edwards, Dennis. Jesus the Wisdom of God: An Ecological Theology. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995.

Gottfried, Robert R. Economics, Ecology, and the Roots of Western Faith. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.

Harper, Brad, and Paul L. Metzger. Exploring Ecclesiology: An Evangelical and Ecumenical Introduction. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009.

Jung, L. Shannon. “Grounded in God: Ecology, Consumption and the Small Church.” Anglican Theological Review 78, no. 4 (1996): 587-602.

Lee-Park, Sun Ai. “The Forbidden Tree and the Year of the Lord.” In Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion, Rosemary R. Ruether, 107-116. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

Park, Rohun. “Revisiting the Parable of the Prodigal Son for Decolonization: Luke’s Reconfiguration of Oikos in 15:11-32.” Biblical Interpretation 17, no. 5 (2009): 507-520.

Schut, Michael. “Coming Home: Economics and Ecology.” Anglican Theological Review 91, no. 4 (2009): 581-588.

Snyder, Howard A. Liberating the Church: The Ecology of Church and Kingdom. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1983.

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Glimpses of Divine Light: The Trinitarian Nature and Work of God

Introduction

An analysis of how the work of the Holy Spirit and the work of Christ relate to one another requires, from the onset, an affirmation that they are, in fact, related.  This cannot be done outside a trinitarian framework which acknowledges the inseparability of oikonomia and theologia; the mystery of salvation is inextricably bound up with the mystery of the triune God. The main obstacle to delineating this relationship lies in the difficulty of doing Christology and pneumatology without subordinating one to the other.

The need therefore arises to construct the two in mutual subordination within a trinitarian framework wherein we can conceive of a Christological pneumatology and a pneumatological Christology; if this divine division of labor is taken too far, we will digress from trinitarian theology to tritheism.  By allowing perspectives from the Orthodox and Catholic traditions to dialogue with the theological insights of the Reformed and Protestant communities, perhaps we can facilitate the kind of ecumenical spirit needed to tread such precarious theological territory.  For it is only in the one Spirit of the one Father and only Son that we have any hope for redemption in the one Kingdom and one community that Jesus desires his disciples to become (Jn. 17).

Whatever can be said of the work of Christ and the Spirit must take the doctrine of creation as its backdrop.

From creation, we can establish a trinitarian framework of human relationships–between humans and God, between humans and other humans, and between humans and the rest of creation–all of which are mediated in the Spirit.  The experience of sin is a corresponding threefold alienation with respect to these harmonious relationships, which leads to the need and hope for an act of redemption, as alluded to by the prophetic expectation of God’s Spirit being poured over all creation, as well as the New Testament hope for a new creation.

 

To understand how the work of Christ fits into this framework, we must also turn to Genesis to explore the creation of humankind in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-28), and to examine the kind of work humans were created to do–mediate God’s presence in creation and sustain its original, perfect harmony (2:15).  This work is ultimately tied to the presence of the Spirit which was breathed into humanity during creation (2:7), and which is needed for humankind to be restored.  Thus, the work of Christ consists in a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, who was filled with the Spirit in such a way as to reclaim the image of God (Col. 1:15), inaugurate the reestablishment of God’s Kingdom, and ultimately becomes so filled by the Spirit as to pour it out himself for the redemption of all.  The work of Christ and that of the Spirit, thus, become intertwined so that, as Vladimir Lossky has said, “Christ becomes the sole image appropriate to the common nature of humanity. The Holy Spirit grants to each person created in the image of God the possibility of fulfilling the likeness in the common nature.”

The relationship implicit in the trinitarian understanding of the oikonomia has also led St. Irenaeus to call the Son and the Spirit “the two hands of God,” whose presence and work are active in the sanctification–or theosis as it is called in the Orthodox tradition–of the body of Christ, and through it, to work for the salvation of the world.

What follows is an attempt to briefly outline how the theme of oikonomia is developed in scripture and doctrine in order to move toward a way of understanding Christian discipleship and life in the Spirit–from proclaiming to performing our doctrines of faith.

The Work of the Spirit: From the Beginning

The two creation accounts in Genesis make it quite clear that human beings were created for and in community.  This involves a series of three relationships: with the creator, with the animals and the earth, and with each other (and the self).  In fact, the only thing in all of the creation process that was said by God to be “not good” was that the human being should be alone (Gen. 2:28).  Sin is both the cause and effect of the experience of alienation with respect to these relationships; it is the disordering of the created order of relationships.

The freedom in which humanity was created is solely within the context of relationship; as finite beings, we must be paradoxically bound to our relationships if we are to be freed from the alienating power of sin.  This led Paul, for one, to use the stark language, contrasting slavery to sin with slavery to righteousness in Christ (Rom. 6:16-20).  Thus, freedom and salvation from this alienation requires, as Luther put it, not for sin to leave man, but for man to take leave of sin.

Hence, the need for the Spirit’s activity to be mediated by the work of a human being to reconcile humanity’s estrangement from God.  In short, God’s creative and redemptive activity are one; he created by his Word (dabar), and his redemptive Spirit is his Breath (ruach) by which he created and redeems humankind (Ps. 33:6; Gen. 2:7).

This anticipates the frame of reference that led early Christians to see Christ as the divine Word (logos) made flesh; an incarnation of the Word, Breath and Spirit of God in human form (Jn.1).

The tradition of hope for God’s redemption by his Spirit is given particularly vivid expression in the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible, the themes of which were heavily drawn upon in the language and tradition of the New Testament.  It is impossible to understand Christian testimony about the Spirit of Jesus Christ without seeing it within the eschatological backdrop of Hebrew prophecy.  For the prophets, the violated relationships which constitute sin represent the disorder of God’s order, which is often poetically depicted as a sort of un-creation of God’s creative activity (Amos 5:8-27).  This, however, was not the end of the prophetic vision, which goes on to promise the pouring out of God’s liberating and life-giving Spirit on all flesh (Joel 2:28-29), which will usher in the dawn of a new creation (Ezek. 36:24-28).

By Jesus’ time, however, many had come to believe that the activity of the Spirit had ended because God no longer seemed to speak to them through his prophets.

 

Thus, the language of the promise of redemption through God’s Spirit became the appropriate means of understanding the redemption experienced by the Christian community in the person of Christ.  As Moltmann describes it, they saw anew the work of the Spirit in the ministry of John the Baptist, as it was given to Jesus when it descended upon him at his baptism, then empowered him while leading him to face temptation in the desert, gave him authority in teaching and healing, sustained him in his suffering, and finally broke into the world of God-forsakenness at his death on the cross only to raise him into new life, being poured out by Christ himself for the new creation that is the coming Kingdom of God.

Such an understanding is corroborated by the Orthodox theology of St. Gregory of Nazianzen, who saw the work of the Spirit clearly active throughout the biblical narrative of Christ’s own work.

The work of the Spirit in the Orthodox process of theosis, has also been described in the Catholic tradition as the very same process of sanctification by which the “divinization of the humanity of Christ” is accomplished, then shared with the community of faith.

The language of theosis and sanctification can be especially helpful for the discovery of work of the Spirit in the church within Protestant traditions that have emphasized justification in its stead.

An analysis of this theme within the life and work of Christ will thus constitute a useful paradigm in which we can understand the work of the Spirit that restores the threefold relationships that have lapsed into threefold estrangement.

 

The Work of Christ: Renewing Relationships

We need to affirm that the human being Jesus of Nazareth was sanctified by the Spirit into oneness with God (Christology from below), and then to speak simultaneously of the incarnation of the divine hypostasis of the Son of God (Christology from above); in Christ, the humanity of Jesus is brought into oneness with God who is then brought into oneness with humanity at the same time.

Likewise, we can describe the work of salvation as both the overcoming of death and sin, and as the perfection of fallen human nature through the restoration of right relationships.

Whereas Adam had set an unfortunate precedent in grasping for what was not his –namely, taking the place of God–bringing death for all (Gen. 3), Jesus set a new precedent by humbling himself in sheer obedience to God unto death, bringing the grace of new life to all (1 Cor. 15:21).

This parallel led to the development within Christology of seeing Jesus as a new Adam, the firstborn and eldest brother of a new eschatological family, to mark the dawn of a new creation.

As the true image of God, Jesus becomes for us the image of true humanity in fellowship with God, into whose likeness all of creation is to be born anew.

 

Just as creation was brought into its original order through the wisdom of God (Prv. 3:19), Jesus has come to be seen as the mediator of this wisdom in human form as the Word incarnate (Jn.1).  In Jesus, this wisdom becomes manifest in the way he reestablished proper relationships with God, creation, and other humans through the way he lived and died.

In his life, he preached and lived the good news of the Kingdom of God.  While there was a well-established prophetic expectation for a future in which God would once again rule over his creation, Jesus was unique in proclaiming it in the present tense, thereby inaugurating it himself (Mk. 1:15).

Because he related to God as his Father (Mt. 6:5), he paved the way for others to be adopted as children of God (Eph. 1:5)  The key to understanding our faith in Jesus therefor lies in the faith of Jesus, whose obedience to the will of God even in suffering unto death remained perfect; this is what has made his life and death effective in bringing righteousness to others.

The language of Jesus’ death as an atoning substitutionary sacrifice can become misleading and morbid if we treat Jesus’ death in isolation from the resurrection.

Together with the joy of Easter, the metaphor of sacrifice, however abused and misappropriated it may be in isolation, also has the power to speak to the very heart of God with its capacity to orient us to his graceful, self-giving love poured out for his creation.

Because Jesus lived so fully in the Spirit, after he was raised from the dead by the Spirit, the Spirit became his to give to all creation.

 

 

The Spirit, Christ and the Kingdom: At Work in the Church

In his book The Trinity and the Kingdom, Moltmann outlines a thoroughly trinitarian development in the unfolding of the Kingdom of God: the Kingdom of the Father, the Kingdom of the Son, and the Kingdom of the Spirit.  In the first of these, that of the Father, humans are revealed to be not mere servants of an earthly ruler, but servants to the creator God, reclaiming the divinely endowed task of sustaining his creation (Gen. 2:15).

We are released from our bondage to the Law which Christ fulfilled–not by abolishing it, but by internalizing and therein protecting it from being broken.

Instead of being hopelessly bound to religious customs and rituals, we are freed to live according to the natural order of God’s creation, taking on this already divinely established way of life.

 

In the Kingdom of the Son, the servants of God are further revealed to be his children; we begin to relate to him as a king who is also our parent.

The promise of the cross is freedom from sin; the freedom to be obedient to God.  This is because obedience can only come from within, and cannot be externally coerced by any threat of violence or fear–even unto death on the Roman cross.

The word translated “ransom” (lutron) in Mark 10:45 carries the connotation of the price that is paid to free someone from slavery, and this is the sense in which the obedient death of Jesus must be understood.

Through the faith in and of Christ, who sends his Spirit to us, we are now adopted as God’s children (Gal. 3:2), so that we can share in his intimate union with the God he revealed to be our Abba Father (Gal. 4:6).

As we are able to share in Christ’s baptism in the Spirit, we must remember that “Christian baptism is not…baptism into a particular community of faith but into the universal new humanity, the body of Christ, designed to nurture commitments to universal humanization.”

While many in the Protestant West have focused on doctrines of justification, the Orthodox emphasis on theosis–the work of Christ’s restoration of true humanity, as well as the pouring out of his Spirit to effect this process within the church–is an element of good news that we cannot afford to neglect.

 

Finally, with the Kingdom of the Spirit, comes the hope of freedom from death.  In the Spirit, we who are God’s children are further revealed to be God’s friends.

The full disclosure of the Kingdom of God is eschatological, so the hope of freedom from death is latent, though not yet manifest.  As the body of Christ, we experience simultaneously the joy represented by Easter and the suffering represented by the cross; we are free to rejoice where we experience the liberation of the Spirit, which also compels us into solidarity with those who are still in bondage.

Thus, even as we experience the freedom of Easter, we are not permitted to escape this world of death and suffering; it is our task to accept this world and work patiently and diligently by the renewing power of the Spirit to transform it into the world that is to come.

 

 

Conclusion

We have seen the work of the Spirit and that of Christ in various Christian perspectives, which have arisen from a multitude of attempts to grasp the profound mysteries of the triune God and his work of salvation and redemption.  On some points these perspectives agree more than others, but they can and must be brought together in the name of the Spirit who blows where she wills, in spite of the doctrinal boxes we attempt to fit ourselves and our God into.  Moving past these conceptual differences, we must strive to live by the Spirit of Christ so that the good news “will not be a matter of proclamation but of service, since the proof of our dogmatic pudding will be found in the acts of kindness and justice…which we conduct in the name of Jesus Christ.”

 

To say Jesus is the Christ is to imply that his is a divine Spirit, a Holy Spirit; to say that the Son of God was Jesus of Nazareth is to say that his divine Spirit is also a very human one.  Thus, it must be said that the process of theosis is as much one of becoming human as it is of participating in the divine life.  There is no need to speak of God becoming human without in the same breath (ruach?) speaking of our becoming truly human.  To speak of Christ, then, is to say, ‘If God lived as a human being, this is who he would be…this is how he would be…this is the gospel he would preach…and want us to be and preach,‘ and to affirm that in Jesus of Nazareth, this is exactly what has happened.  Jesus is like a prism through which the unbearably bright white light of the Spirit is channeled, concentrated, dissected, then reflected as the rainbow of colors that are its constituent parts, so that we all might find our own individual frequency within the full illuminating spectrum of divine light.  As the Spirit filled Jesus without dissolving his human identity, so shall it be for those of us who become part of the body of Christ, that we may “not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our] mind[s]. Then [we] will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Rm. 12:2).

 

Bibliography

Bobrinskoy, Boris. “The Indwelling of the Spirit in Christ: ‘Pneumatic Christology’ in the Cappadocian Fathers.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1984): 49-65. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0000941057&site=ehost-live&scope=site (5 April 2010).

 

Breck, John. “The Two Hands of God: Christ and the Spirit in Orthodox Theology.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1996): 231-246. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001020499&site=ehost-live&scope=site (5 April 2010).

 

Brümmer, Vincent. Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005.

 

Coffey, David. “The “Incarnation” of the Holy Spirit in Christ.” Theological Studies 45, no. 3 (1984): 466-480. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0000925407&site=ehost-live&scope=site (5 April 2010).

 

Groppe, Elizabeth T. “From God For Us to Living in the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ: Catherine LaCugna’s Trinitarian Theology as a Foundation for her Theology of the Holy Spirit.” Horizons 27, no. 2 (2000): 343-346. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001277040&site=ehost-live&scope=site (5 April 2010).

 

Gunton, Colin E. The Actuality of Atonement. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989.

 

Hector, Kevin W. “The Mediation of Christ’s Normative Spirit: A Constructive Reading of Schleiermacher’s Pneumatology.” Modern Theology 24, no. 1 (2008): 1-22.

 

Lee, Jung Young. The Trinity in Asian Perspective. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.

 

Malcolm, Lois. “Jesus and the Trinity.” Word & World 29, no. 2 (2009): 143-151.

 

McFarlane, Graham. “Atonement, Creation and Trinity.” In The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement. Ed. Derek Tidball, David Hilborn, and Justin Thacker, 192-206. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2008.

 

Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology of Play. Translated by Reinhard Ulrich. San Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1972.13

 

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation. Translated by Magaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.

 

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom. Translated by Magaret Kohl. San Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1989.

 

Moore, Stephen D. Post Structuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.

 

Seeley, David. “Deconstructing the New Testament.” Vol. 5. In Biblical Interpretation Series. Ed. Alan Culpepper and Rolf Rendtorff, New York: E.J. Brill, 1994.

 

Yong, Amos, Dale T. Irvin, Frank D. Macchia, and Ralph Del Colle. “Christ and Spirit: Dogma, Discernment, and Dialogical Theology in a Religiously Plural World.” Journal of Pentacostal Theology 12, no. 1 (2003): 15-83. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001473052&site=ehost-live&scope=site (5 April 2010).

 

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WHO IS GOD AND WHO ARE WE: TOWARD A DIALECTICAL UNDERSTANDING OF DIVINITY AND HUMANITY

2/20/2010

In what sense can we speak of Jesus as fully divine and fully human?  For centuries this question has baffled the minds of Christians who have sought to come to terms with who Jesus was and who he has continued to be for his followers.  Though most of the language we use to address this question has its source in scripture, the details and implications of this question do not seem to have been so problematic for the original writers and readers of the New Testament literature.  As this language was appropriated by the early Church Fathers and debated in the Ecumenical Councils, however, it was gradually abstracted into categories of Platonic philosophical thought wherein it became conceptually problematic.

It was this kind of abstract theologizing, founded, as it were, on inadequate philosophical grounds, which produced a litany of misunderstandings, conflicts, and divisions within the church.

The importance of understanding Jesus was felt as strongly as it had been by his earliest followers, but the context for this understanding had shifted dramatically, resulting in two millennia of confusion and fragmentation which is not easily untangled.  If there is to be any hope for  a truly unified ecumenical church, however, we must humbly begin to take up the task of deconstructing these doctrinal puzzles in order to re-establish the cultural, linguistic, and historical context of Jesus and the writings produced by the early communities of his followers.  To impose later definitions upon the language of scripture is both anachronistic and detrimental to our ability to appreciate the gospels as intended by their authors.

If we continue to proclaim the full divinity and humanity of Jesus, reading this presupposition back into the New Testament texts, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the Church Fathers and to persist in our irreconcilable divisions.  Thus, we must seek to reclaim the language of the earliest Christian communities in the rich fullness of their original context, so that we may once again understand how we continue to experience God through Jesus in our own context.  I will argue that a two-fold dialectic is needed to come to such an understanding.  First, we must make a conceptual distinction between the Pre-Easter Jesus of Nazareth and the Post-Easter Jesus Christ to understand how a first century Jewish man came to be professed as Lord.  Then, we must explore the intricacies of the dialectic of divinity and humanity in general in order to understand the significance of God’s revelation to us through Jesus in terms of who we are, who he is, and how we can envisage our relationship with him.

Our first task is to take up the question of what can be known about the Pre-Easter Jesus of Nazareth as an individual historical person.  While this knowledge cannot be absolutely determined as a matter of historical fact, much progress can be made by simply exploring the cultural context in which Jesus lived.  We know, first of all, that Jesus was a Palestinian Jew who lived in a period of Roman domination.  He came out of a religious tradition characterized by creational and covenantal monotheism in which God was seen as the creator of all that exists, and believed to be a God that entered into a covenant relationship with the people of Israel through whom he chose to unfold his plan of restoring the original harmony of this creation.

Given this context, it is obvious why Roman rule posed not only a political, but ultimately a theological challenge which produced a gamut of responses.  Messianism is deeply rooted in the notion that God would again deliver his people from the hands of foreign oppressors.  There is also a deep historical connection between times of exile and the word of God being spoken to his people through prophets, who reminded the people of their relationship with God and warned of the consequences associated with forgetting who they were (God’s people) and who God is (the Creator).  Again, this points back toward the creational and covenantal monotheism. This Jewish historical context is indispensable for interpreting the roles and actions of John the Baptist and Jesus, who deliberately associated themselves with this prophetic tradition and were, according to the New Testament, readily recognized for having done so by their contemporaries.

With this picture in mind we may now examine what the first Christian communities wrote about Jesus.

According to a consensus of New Testament scholars, it is clear that the earliest known writings containing biographical information about Jesus are the synoptic gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke, of which Mark is regarded as the earliest.

Within Mark, we read descriptions of Jesus made by his earliest followers, using the religious and cultural idioms most familiar to them to describe how they had experienced God’s revelation through the life and death of Jesus.

Such language is primarily manifested in the usage of several titles attributed to Jesus, all of which are deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, and none of which were originally or exclusively associated with Jesus, much less did they implicitly or explicitly denote his unique divinity; only later would these terms begin to carry such a special connotation.

The usage of Son of Man and Son of God need not, however, be taken as titles solely attributed to Jesus in reference to his two natures, divine and human.  Son of God is not the same as God the Son, the second person of the trinity, but was instead suggestive of the special sense of intimacy and commissioning Jesus had with God.  Son of Man, on the other hand, is notoriously ambiguous; it could simply mean ‘human being’ or it could refer to various Old Testament images, such as the Righteous Sufferer of Psalm 22.

The original intent of using titles like Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David, Lord, and Word was metaphorical in the sense that they were a means of likening something new that was not fully understood (their experience of Jesus) to something familiar within their religious tradition.  In this sense, such titles were a means of appropriating the language that had applied to God’s chosen people of Israel, and to reapply them to Jesus, who had revealed to his followers the truth about who God is and who his people are called to become.

We can catch a glimpse of the self-understanding of the Pre-Easter Jesus in Mark, which is what N.T. Wright has called “the story of a Galilean prophet, announcing the kingdom of Israel’s God, summoning Israel to change her direction, that is, to repent.”

This is a portrait of a real human being, who modeled the paradigm of openness in relationship with the God he called ‘Father,’ and who, rather than explicitly defining who he was, has chosen to encounter his followers with the open-ended question that begs our creative response: ‘who do you say I am?’

This sounds more like the kind of question posed by one who wishes to be followed in both life and death, more than a statement intended to produce conclusive doctrines about abstract conceptions of his nature(s).

As we begin to understand the language used to speak of Jesus as a product of a faith community seeking to reconcile their Jewish roots with their profound experience of God’s Spirit in the person of Jesus, we can better appreciate what these early Christians were trying to express.  The crux is, as Marcus Borg eloquently summarizes, that “very early on we [Christians] metaphorized our history, and since then we have often historicized our metaphors.”

When this happens, we find ourselves lost in nonsensical doctrines we no longer understand, and we lose the rich meanings imbedded in the original metaphorical language.  It seems much more powerful to encounter, for example, the ‘I am’ statements the gospel John as metaphorical and poetic product of a community’s effort to understand the experience of the Post-Easter Christ, rather than as being literally and factually stated by the Pre-Easter Jesus; it says much more about what an extraordinary figure Jesus was if his earliest followers came to speak of him in such high regard in spite of the fact that he never claimed any such thing for himself than it would if he had foisted such an understanding upon them during his life.

This is not, however, to undermine the profundity of the experience of the divine Spirit of God that these Christians witnessed in the risen Christ, nor to call to discontinue the use of such language in both scripture and creed.  Instead, it seems as though a literal interpretation does more to undermine its significance, where the use of metaphorical and poetic language implies an attempt to express something so powerful that ordinary language simply could not begin to contain it.  Attempts to understand these truths literally have led to failure and accusations of heresy; the power of a metaphor rests in its ability to point beyond its own imagery toward a greater and higher truth while being expressed in a shared experience.

We must part with the notion that a metaphor is somehow less true or inferior to literal language, because, quite simply, the gospels were not written by modern journalists. Only poetic language can point toward the deeper meaning we experience when we engage the Christ of faith, but only if we know where these inherited idioms come from and what they have meant for those who used them.

Understanding our language is tantamount to understanding Jesus.  It is at this point that there is continuity between the Pre-Easter Jesus and Post-Easter Christ: the Easter experience of Christ as a divine presence after his death flows directly out of the experience of the empowering of the Spirit in the healing, teaching and wisdom of Jesus of Nazareth.

Thus, Paul began to reinterpret the original language, and especially the title “Christ,” as a way of addressing the profound intimacy of Jesus Christ and the God he called the Father.  Such creative use of familiar language in unfamiliar ways is poetry at its best.  Paul, then, must be seen as creatively responding in an ideal way to the question Jesus posed: ‘who do you say I am?’  As one deeply imbedded in Jewish religious life, Paul experienced God’s presence in Jesus so radically that Jesus became his lens for re-envisioning the implications of everything he previously knew about God.  Paul as Pharisee had lived the Torah, but Jesus seemed to live the Torah in such a way that Paul had to rethink (repent) how God related to his people.

Christ, for Paul, was a more powerful symbol than the Torah itself for establishing an identity for the people of God–one which now extends beyond the nation of Israel.

We must not, however, ignore the direction Paul takes as he expounds this into the notion of our adoption as God’s children, made possible by Jesus, who is seen as the firstborn of a restored humanity.

It is also significant that all of this is done within the thoroughly Jewish understanding of God as the creator, and of human beings as his image or likeness, as described in Genesis 1:26. In Jesus, we have received a revelation not only about who God is, but also who we humans are, and accordingly how we are related to God.

Here we encounter not only the question of Jesus’ divinity and humanity in particular, but also the dialectical interrelation of divinity and humanity in general.

If we affirm the divinity of Christ in the same spirit as Paul, this forces us to radically rethink our notions of what the divine nature is; if we affirm his humanity, as well, then we must recognize that divinity and humanity cannot be defined in isolation.

Defining natures in a mutually exclusive way is unjustified, unproductive, and unnecessary; a more inclusive dialectical way of thinking is needed to make sense of the concept of incarnation.

The central Biblical symbol for exploring this dialectic is the creation of humans in God’s image, and Paul’s use of it when he says of Christ, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15).

If we take this connection seriously, along with Jesus’ use of ‘Father’ for God, we must see in this a humanizing of God.  Anthropomorphism is by no means a novelty in God-language, but in these usages there is a liberation from false anthropomorphism, and implicitly from false humanism.  That is, in Berdyaev’s words, “Human-ness is divine; it is not man that is divine, but human-ness…the integral attitude of man to life…the revelation of the fullness of human nature…the disclosure of the creative nature.”

This must be taken in conjunction with the fact that “man as we know him is to but a small extent human; he is even inhuman.”

For Berdyaev, our exalting language of Christ has stopped short of reaching the Pauline notions of adoption and sonship.  One of the primary reasons is that we tend to equate God with power, or omnipotence; such a supposition is seriously challenged by the fact that in a literal sense, the Roman empire was more powerful than the Son of God.

Thus, if God is powerful, it is power in a very different sense; it is spiritual power and love.  Carrying this concept of power a little further, we begin to see that God’s Kingdom, which Jesus preached and ushered in, is a very different sort of kingdom, and Jesus, having been executed by the most “powerful” empire on earth must be a very different sort of Lord than the roman Caesar.  If Jesus is in a sense God, this means God himself suffered and was crucified by the most powerful human nation, but it also means that God breaks through our estrangement and alienation from him by sharing our suffering out of his profound love.

If we attempt, as the Fathers have tried to do, to locate Jesus’ deity in his miraculous works and in his resurrection from death instead of in his suffering, we fall right away into docetism and we are again cut off from this Jesus who only seemed to be, yet, as it turns out, ultimately was not like us.

 

Thus, if we wish to uphold the language of our tradition and proclaim the full divinity and humanity of Jesus, we can do so only if we explore the wider implications of how we share in that relationship as, in Paul’s language, the adopted children of God of whom Jesus was the firstborn.  In the revelation of Jesus we must encounter the truth not only of who God is, but who we are as well.  If we allow the rich resonances of our metaphorical and poetic religious language to penetrate to greater depth than face-value literalism, we can continue in the spirit of Paul and the early church by recasting symbols from our own cultural context in a creative response to Jesus’ question: “who do you say I am?”  This creative act of engaging our religious convictions with the cultural world we inhabit is fundamental in our attempt to understand our identity as individuals in a faith community.  If we have nothing new to say about who Jesus is, who God is, and who we are, then the voice of God has ceased to speak to us; if we do take this up as our task, however, the Word of God will once again be pronounced and God’s new creation can come into being as his Kingdom begins to break through and restore its original perfect harmony.

Bibliography

 

Bateman, Herbert W.,  IV. “Defining the Titles “Christ” and “Son of God” in Mark’s Narrative Presentation of Jesus.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50, no. 3 (2007): 537-559. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001612497&site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed February 17, 2010).

 

Berdyaev, Nikolai A. The Divine and the Human. Translated by R M. French. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949.

 

Borg, Marcus J. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. San Fransisco: Harper Collins, 2006.

 

Borg, Marcus J., and N T. Wright. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. San Fransisco: Harper Collins, 1999.

 

Brümmer, Vincent. Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005.

 

Gianoulis, George C. “Is Sonship in Romans 8:14-17 a Link With Romans 9?.” Bibliotheca Sacra 166, no. 661 (2009): 70-83. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001703998&site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed February 17, 2010).

 

Hick, John. The Metaphor of God Incarnate. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993.

 

Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. Christology: A Global Introduction. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.

 

Le Poidevin, Robin. “Identity and the Composite Christ: An Incarnational Dilemma.” Religious Studies 42, no. 2 (2009): 157-186. http://libproxy.anderson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001733874&site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed February 17, 2010).

 

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God. Translated by R A. Wilson and John Bowden. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

 

Need, Stephen W. Truly Divine & Truly Human: The Story of Christ and the Seven Ecumenical Councils. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2008.

 

Skarsaune, Oskar. “From the Jewish Messiah to the Creeds of the Church.” Evangelical Review of Theology 32, no. 3 (2008): 224-237.

 

 

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How Does the Christian Understanding of God Shape Theological Reflection?

10/05/2009

If our task is to explicate the Christian understanding of God as it shapes theological reflection, we must first assume that there is such a Christian understanding, and then attempt to articulate it.  The primary source of a Christian understanding, then, is the witness of scripture; the interpretation of scripture is subsequently informed by tradition—the myriad attempts that have been made by previous and contemporary Christians to glean just such an understanding from scripture.  In this endeavor, we must readily admit, like Anselm, that God cannot be comprehensively understood or conceptualized, and that we must rely first on our faith to guide our understanding.  Nevertheless, we also admit that our understandings are grounded in a context or worldview, and that they rely on reason and logic to be articulated.  Although the scripture’s witness of God occurs within a Hebrew context, much of traditional Christian thought has appropriated a Hellenistic hermeneutic that is not intrinsically a Christian paradigm.  Furthermore, the spread of global Christianity throughout modernity has inspired the appropriation of various other cultural contexts as interpretive lenses through which Christianity can be understood.  Rather than legitimate one culture’s system of logic over against another’s, this crisis of interpretive pluralism forces us back to God’s self-revelation in scripture and our humble faith that this revelation is self-authenticating.  By using the “both/and” logic of Chinese philosophy instead of the “either/or” reasoning of Greek philosophy, we can better understand the uniqueness of a Christian understanding of a God who is transcendent, a God who is one, and also a God who is with us.

In order to affirm that God is transcendent, we must first dispense of the Aristotelian dualistic logic of “either/or.”  This leads to an insolubly static duality of subject and object, which is incompatible with a God who transcends the division of subject and object.  At this, Karl Barth rightly adopts a “both/and” or “neither/nor” logic in place of “either/or.”  He suggests that God is both essence and existence, and neither an object nor an idea.  Thus, not only is the logic of Aristotle inadequate to conceptualize a transcendent God, but also neither is the Platonic conception of ideals.  In the tradition of the church, the metaphysics of Greek ontology led to the static ontology of God seen as the essence of being.  This thought permeated both the Neo-Platonist thought of Augustine, as well as the Aristotelian thought of Aquinas.  Seeing God as a static being, however, is incomprehensible to a humankind and a world that are in the dynamic process of becoming, and not being.  The “both/and” logic in which Chinese philosophy is rooted allows us to conceive of a God who, by transcending the dualism of “either/or” is both being and becoming.  If, as we faithfully believe, God is ultimate reality, he must be both.  Thus, Jung Young Lee is able to account for both the changelessness alluded to by the doctrine of divine impassability as the source of creation, and the need for a dynamic conception of God to relate to humankind, by asserting the Chinese concept of change as ultimate reality.  Thus, by conceiving of God as change, God implicitly transcends any objectification, while still relating to the world in which all things are in a process of change and becoming.  If we read God as change, then it is true when Lee asserts that, “everything changes because of change [i.e. God], but change itself is changeless.”  In other words, the use of this Chinese conception informs and enhances our traditional notions that God is the first cause through which our dynamic world of changes has come into being, and yet this God is also unchanging.  Rather than fall into the dualistic trap of interpreting these doctrines in light of a static God of substance, we can use the inclusiveness of the concept of change to understand how such a God relates to us and reveals himself to us in a world in flux.

Next, we must see how this understanding of God as changeless change sufficiently articulates the Christian concept of a God who is one.  In this endeavor, we must turn to the scriptures that mediate God’s self-revelation.  Deuteronomy 6:4 contains the Hebrew Shema, an ancient understanding of the God of the Bible.  In the transliterated Hebrew text, it reads, “Sh’ma Yis-ra-eil, A-do-nai E-lo-hei-nu, A-do-nai E-chad,” which literally means, “Hear Israel! Yahweh our God, Yahweh one.”  By virtue of its ambiguity, it is translated in a number of different senses in English, such as “Hear O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD alone” and “Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.”  Both senses emphasize the unity or oneness of God, and point toward the Christian conception of monotheism.  Old Testament scholar Victor Hamilton, however, casts this concept of monotheism in a different light: it does not seem to indicate belief in one God as opposed to a polytheistic belief in many gods; monotheism in the Old Testament rather indicates a God who is consistent in his action in history.  Thus, “a God who is inconsistent is historically polytheistic.”  God is our God because he is the same for us as he was for the patriarchs, he is one because he has not changed, and he is alone because he is God of all.  As we see in Amos 9:7, God is both the God of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, and the God of the exoduses of other peoples as well.  He transcends the dichotomized duality of “us” and “them” precisely by being one God for all.  As Barth argues, God’s transcendent unity is also the unity of the past, present, and future.  Thus, we begin to see that the authoritative uniqueness of Christianity is grounded not in the exclusiveness, but in the inclusiveness of God.  As Lee states:

It encourages not competition but cooperation, not domination but coordination, not authority but authenticity, not conformity but affirmation.  It rejects…a dualism that is in any case incompatible with the original Judeo-Christian message.

Both Barth and Lee are articulating the notion that theological reflection cannot assert its own authority based on the merit of its propositions.  Hence, Christian theology is authoritative not so much by virtue of an overt claim to authority as by its self-authenticating proclamation of a transcendent God who is one and who includes all by loving grace.  This God is changeless insofar as he is consistent from one time and people to another, but he also implicitly must embody change in order to be the same God in changed circumstances.

Lastly, it becomes clear that God, when understood as changeless change, is not only unified and transcendent, but he is also Immanuel—God with us.  As Barth confirms, God reveals himself to us in the scriptures and through the history of his deeds.  He does this because he has a fundamental interest in humankind, which culminated in the act of the incarnation of Christ.  The concept of changeless change helps us see God in light of the dynamic interrelationship that Barth asserts is the task of theology to describe; a God whose unity allows him to “exist neither next to man nor merely above him, but rather with him, by him, and most important of all, for him.”  Traditionally, this aspect of God has led to his characterization as a personal God, but when he introduces himself for the first time in scripture, we see that while his relation to us is on some level personal, his nature nevertheless transcends the bounds of personal and impersonal.  Thus in his meeting with Moses in Exodus 3:14, when asked by Moses what his name is, his response is strikingly non-symbolic and mysterious: “I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.”  The other names we use for God symbolically reflect the conditions of certain encounters with God, but when God defines himself, he does so non-symbolically as “is-ness.”  Though it is important that God relates to us on a personal level, and that he achieved the fulfillment of this relationship through the incarnation of Christ, the impersonal or super-personal nature of God must not be forgotten.  Otherwise we risk misunderstanding God through what Barth calls “anthropotheology” rather than properly trying to understand ourselves and God through “theoanthropology.”  In other words, God must first be understood as transcendent before he can be understood as Immanuel; otherwise we merely reduce God to being Immanuel in the sense that he is one of us.  We were created in his image, so we must not cast him in our image; instead we must faithfully strive to understand him, which in turn will inform a proper understanding of ourselves as his likeness.

By using the “both/and” logic of Chinese philosophy instead of the “either/or” reasoning of Greek philosophy, we can better comprehend how God is transcendent; a God who is one and alone, and also a God who is with us.  This understanding prompts us to reflect upon how we relate to God, and how we live our lives as Christian believers in this God.  Since he is a God who loves, forgives, and extends grace, we are called to do the same; since is inclusively one universal God of all, we must also be inclusive of all; since he exhibits his authority through his humility, being tortured and killed by the authorities of this world, we are called to be humble servants.  As he is the God of the Gospel, we are likewise called to bring this “good news.”  If, however, we fail to understand him in this dynamic interrelationship, and if we fall into a static conception of him as wholly other, then we cut ourselves off from allowing him to transform us.  For this reason, we have faith in him, that we may understand him, and that through our faith seeking understanding we may be transformed by him.

 

 

 

References

 

Barth, Karl. Evangelical Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963.

 

Charry, Ellen. Inquiring After God. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

 

Hamilton, Victor. Handbook On the Pentateuch. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005.

 

Lee, Jung Young. The Theology of Change. New York: Orbis Books, 1979.

 

Siddur, Siddur.org.  Available from HYPERLINK “http://www.siddur.org/transliterations/SatAM/11shacharit_shema_2.php#shma” http://www.siddur.org/transliterations/SatAM/11shacharit_shema_2.php#shma; Internet; accessed October 5, 2009.

 

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Spirit: Missing Link in the Doctrine of the Trinity?

11/24/2009

Since its earliest days, the church has held the doctrine of the trinity to be of central importance.  Agreement on this point was nearly unanimous.  The proper articulation of the doctrine, however, has been one of the most contentious and divisive areas of Christian theology.  The difficulty of elucidating and grasping the trinity has in turn led to its neglect in some cases and its outright dismissal in others.  In both instances, the abandonment of the trinity stems from assumptions and modes of thought that are non-trinitarian.  Forcing the trinity to be non-trinitarian is a tiresome and fruitless endeavor, but it has unfortunately been a common pitfall.  Inevitably, contradiction arises out of monistic and dualistic thought.  These are but two sides of the same philosophical coin; the coin that encompasses and surpasses them, then, is trinitarian thought.  Integral to the application of trinitarian thought to the Christian doctrine of the trinity is the least understood and most neglected hypostasis thereof: the Holy Spirit.  In order to reclaim the doctrine of the trinity, we will need to examine the non-trinitarian thinking that ultimately leads to the neglect of the Spirit, explore the implications of the Spirit in trinitarian thinking, and finally begin to discover the role of the Spirit in the Christian life.

To critically examine the validity of affirming the trinity as the Christian concept of God, one must first determine whether the perceived problems of the doctrine lie within the trinity itself, or merely in the poor articulation thereof.  To that end, Lesslie Newbigin points out that the trinity is not so much a problem as a solution to the problem of the dualistic tendencies of classical thought.  The issue is that monotheism is taken as the assumed starting point from which the trinity is derived.  This gives rise to two basic doctrines and one common result.  On the one hand is Tertullian’s conception of the divine substance in three persons,  and on the other hand is the Hegelian conception of the divine as absolute subject.  Both of these are functionally disintegrative as they reduce the three parts of trinity into a static and abstract monotheism; both of them are guilty of reducing trinity to modality.  The problem with these approaches is that they restrict the ‘persons’ of the trinity from having any substantial or subjective personhood, and thereby effectually negate the need for distinguishing between them in the first place.  The result is the insoluble dualism whereby the cold absolute God is isolated from humanity with no mediator.  What is missing is a trinitarian approach, grounded in the inclusive mediator of the Spirit.  That is needed to resolve the startling ecclesial contradiction that the church has no developed doctrine of the Spirit, yet it acknowledges the role of the Spirit as the mediator of all revelation.  The Spirit is the inner connecting principle that connects and brings to completion the seemingly contradictory and exclusive sides of dualism, or the static reductionism of monism.  Thus, we can discern the presence of the Spirit in John 14:11, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”  Without the ‘in’ as a representative of the functioning Spirit, the distinction between the Father and Son are dissolved: “I am the Father and the Father is me.”  If we conceive of God as substance, then we lose this subtlety because ‘in’ is not a substance, and it therefore loses all meaning and significance.  We are led to conclude with Berdyaev that the antithesis between Spirit and matter cannot be upheld, because the “Spirit is freedom, not substance.”

Thus, in the context of the doctrine of the Spirit, the doctrine of the trinity elucidates the unity of God not so much numerically as in terms of fellowship.  It is a co-working of three subjects.  In John 10:30 we read, “I and the Father are one,” not “I and the Father are one and the same.”  The latter would indicate a stress on numerical identity, whereas the actual text tends more toward emphasizing a relationship.  Once again, we may infer the presence of the Spirit in this verse as the connecting principle operating in the word ‘and.’  This is underscored by the notion of marginality that is interwoven with the function of the Spirit as mediator.  Marginality can be seen as the unrecognized existence between two worlds that is treated as if not existing.   The marginality of Jesus is depicted in John 1:11 where his own people do not recognize him. It was not until after the Easter event when the Spirit was poured out that his marginality was to be accepted and transfigured; only in the context of the trinity can we accept the marginal (and thus ourselves be accepted).  Only within trinitarian thought can we experience the harmony of unity and diversity seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

The implications of the trinitarian inclusiveness of the Spirit for Christian living are manifold; they constitute an inexhaustible call for a creative response as a faith community.  If our faith affirms a Spirit who indwells then we must embrace and uphold this as a fundamental mystery.  Our knowledge of God cannot be entirely propositional so we are led to a twofold affirmation of revelation as the humanity of God expressed in the mutual revelation of the Son and the Father on one hand, and the mystery of God expressed in the Spirit on the other.  To speak of the humanity of God is not necessarily an anthropomorphic elevation of man; as Berdyaev paradoxically elaborates, “it might be expressed by saying that God is human whereas man is inhuman.”   The Russian Orthodox thinker Aleksei Khomiakov coined the term sobornost to cast the notion of  the catholicity of the church in a trinitarian light.  In sobornost, he implied, “unity in multiplicity, oneness in diversity…a catholicity realized in quality not in quantity, in depth rather than breadth, a characteristic communicated by the Holy Spirit which enables individual communities, and even persons, to give full and complete manifestation to the mark of catholicity.”  Berdyaev expounds upon Khomiakov’s notion by seeing in the Pentecost of Acts the inauguration of a new era of the Spirit that promises a social and cosmic transfiguration culminating in a “real and not merely symbolic sobornost.”  Moltmann sees this in the transformation from the Shekinah of God that was dwelling with us in the Temple to the Spirit of God that indwells our bodies which become temples (I Cor. 6:13-20).  Through the Spirit we are at last allowed to partake, by faith, in the sonship of Jesus as we are transfigured, as his church, into his body.  In this we are liberated from the earthly kingdoms consisting of lords and servants and invited to freely participate in God’s Kingdom which consists of a loving Father and us as his free children.  As by grace we are included in this sonship, we are called to embody this same grace in extension to the Other.  Only within trinitarian thought can we truly include the Other without attempting to dissolve the otherness.  Then we may engage in the practice not of dialogue, but that of ‘trilogue,’ recognizing the Spirit is already on both sides of the table, accepting the Other as the only truly genuine expression of religious empathy.

The trinity is the essential starting point for all Christian reflection.  If it is to be thoroughly reclaimed, however, it must be on the basis of a truly trinitarian mode of thought.  Only in this paradigm can the implications of the Christian trinity be discussed, and from there the implications for Christian living.  The essence of the trinity is bound up in the acceptance of the Spirit, without which it unravels into a static conception of a God to whom we cannot relate.  This is not to downplay the significance and/or centrality of the Father and the Son, but merely to serve as a corrective to the longstanding neglect of the Spirit and of the lack of its doctrinal development.  Without the trinity and the Spirit, the Christian faith is a hopelessly tragic tale of a despotic God and a condemned humanity forever separated from the God we confess faith in.  Only within the trinity can we find the true Christian hope of the coming Kingdom and the ultimate source of God’s good news for his children.

Bibliography

Berdyaev, Nikolai. Truth and Revelation. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953.

Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. Trinity and Religious Pluralism. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004.

Lee, Jung Y. The Trinity in Asian Perspective. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom. San Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1981.

Newbingin, Lesslie. “The Trinity as Public Truth.” In The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Ritchey, Mary G. “Khomiakov and his Theory of Sobornost.” Diakonia 17, no. 1 (1982): 53-62.

Vanhoozer, Kevin J. “Does the Trinity Belong in a Theology of Religions?.” In The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

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