Two posts on Mark's Gospel

Steve Douglas discusses equal opportunity salvation,

Neither the rich nor the poor are demonized, because the author understood a focus on class or status to be missing Jesus’ point.

And James McGrath has a hunch (AKA an essay) as to how the gospel story ended in Mark's mind if not on paper.

Ramachandra Asks About Gospel Priorities

And as usual he is angry about Western Christianity's myopic vision and not afraid to say why,

Whenever I ask such preachers, “Don’t you want everybody in the world to have the benefits you enjoy?”, the answer I receive is either “That’s the social gospel” or “That’s not our priority, as non-Christians can do that”. If the Gospel is not social, then what is it? And, if non-Christians can make sacrifices to ensure that people like us have a decent life, why are we reluctant to do the same for them? What we are facing here is hypocrisy and double standards, the very things that stirred the indignation of Jesus!

Rowan Williams on Resident Aliens and Social Justice

This essay by Rowan Williams (HT Jason) fits nicely into the diaspora theme of this blog, and also relates to my recent altercation with Steve Douglas ;-), here's an excert.

. . . one of the mainsprings of Christian self-understanding in the formative years of the Church's life was the idea that the believer was essentially a 'migrant', someone who was in any and every situation poised between being at home and being a stranger. In the New Testament and a good deal of the literature that survives from the first couple of Christian centuries, one of the commonest self-descriptions of the Church is in the language that would have been used in the Mediterranean cities for a community of migrant workers, temporary residents.

The Bible as Socialist Tract

Recently Richard Beck observed that

for John [the Baptist], repentance is fundamentally about economics or, more precisely, getting right with money and our possessions. Preparing our hearts for the Lord begins with sharing, fairness, and contentment. That is, if someone is seeking a closer or better relationship with Jesus it seems the the first bit of advice John would give is pretty simple: Start with sharing your material possessions. That's the quickest way to Jesus.

Which to me makes perfect sense, but then I had the priviledge of being raised in a moderately left wing Christian family.  As a very general, and rapidly going out of date, rule non-conformists Christians in England (Methodists, Baptists, etc) have tended to be more red than blue. I know in America the assumption is usually the opposite, that evangelicals are right wing.  And I have been surprised to discover in NZ that the American model is followed pretty closely.  Something about colonies seems to turn non-conformists into capitalists. 

What I hear from people like Glenn Beck is that socialism is wrong because it forces people to do good instead of letting them do it off their own bats.  What Beck and his fans fail to understand is that although they complain that socialism is immoral wealth re-distribution from the rich to the poor capitalism is immoral redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.  All property is theft, those who live in the colonies should know that best of all.  Tax is at least a more even handed form of theft and is at least stealing from those who can afford to lose a little (or even a lot) and does so politely, predicatably and without offering violence (initially).  This is why our modern western society works best when capitalism flourishes under the restraining hand of socialism.  Money rises to the top rewarding those who generate wealth and work hard but imbalances are periodically readjusted so that social and economic disparity never gets so great as to divide the society or leave some of its members without hope or resources for improvement. 

It is well understood that the greater the gap between the rich and the poor the greater conflict and insecurity between the two groups.  Of course the OT law is filled with provisions to avoid this happening, not least the numerous regulations concerning the release of those in indentured servitude at regular intervals and the return of land to families.  Those sort of checks and balances, if practised (and its doubtful that they ever fully were), would enable a society to give people economic second chances.  Today our society offers the lottery and scratch cards and criminal activity as the only hope for those who are unable to make ends meet and escape the poverty trap.  But of course, giving someone a million dolars doesn't actual solve their poverty. 

Another well understood fact is that lottery winners are usually both miserable and broke with a few years of their wins.  Which is why socialism can only ever be half the solution.  Poverty is as much a social/cultural legacy as it is a financial one.  Which is why true social justice is not just a matter of the redistribution of wealth, but also of the redistribution of the gospel, that well kept secret of the transforming power of God to radically change communities, families, and lives.  And that is something no government can do, that is the job of a much larger and more powerful organisation, the church. 

The Decade of Eagleton

As noted earlier, some have suggested that the 00s were the decade of the Atheists.  I predict that the next decade will be the decade of Terry Eagleton.  He is perfectly placed to ride the wave of the new-atheism as a swashbuckling rhetoritician surfer of outrageous derring-doo.  That he is the man for this moment is witnessed to by the sudden surge of interest in his writings by the blogging community. That this is a good thing is that writing at a popular level he may be the one who can rescue North American and Australasian Christianity from its captivity to the political right:

Yes, I quote my father who insisted that Jesus Christ was a socialist and that any Christianity that is not on the side of the dispossessed against the arrogance of the powerful and rich is utterly untraditional. Dawkins and Hitchens write about Christianity and never link the words God, justice and love. That is either a sign of their obtuseness or a sign of the massive self-betrayal of the Christian movement. It has got to the point where intelligent people like them don't understand that Christianity is not about how many months you get in purgatory for adultery. It's about a love and a thirst for justice that will bring you to your death. There's nothing lovely about it.

From here

[prophetic disclaimer: this does not constitute a word from the LORD, only the half baked opinion of someone avoiding working on his masters thesis!!  Therefore it may or may not come true.  Any loss or damage to property or personal fortune as a result of believing this prediction is entirely at the readers own risk. :-)]

Should the church spend its energy doing social work?

There is a tension for me in that any social action must intentionally serve the gospel, that is be intended to be an avenue for people to come to saving knowledge of Christ. But I also feel Christians need to do things because they are the right thing to do, not with an ulterior motive of prosyletization. The most promising avenue for me is an articulation of conversion as the work of God, and of social action as a sign of the gospel. But how you consistently and authentically do that in practice I’m not sure.

[This was a comment I originally made on Phil's blog here, but thought it was worthy of a post of its own.]

Racism, Crime, and the Church

One of the things I was surprised about on coming to NZ was the implicit racism among so many Kiwis who had a view of themselves as enlightened and progressive. The prevailing national attitude is that the most appropriate and effective response to crime is to increase punishments and the length of detention. The fact is that in NZ certain ethnic groups commit crime out of all proportion to the population statistics. By pinning all the blame for criminality on the individual and seeking redress for crime through punishment you are implicitly stating that all responsibility for crime rests on the individual's essential nature. As certain ethnic groups contain a higher proportion of these criminal individuals it can only follow that these ethnic groups are inherently more criminal than others. The only way out of this racist cul-de-sac is for society to accept its own responsibility for the crime as well. Middle class Kiwi's hate this suggestion. They refuse to acknowledge that the historical, cultural and social legacies of NZ have resulted in large groups of disadvantaged people who are inevitably going to make a higher proportion of bad decisions because they have inherited a legacy of bad choices.

This concept of collective guilt is very distasteful to the individual. They do not see how it can be right for them to be blamed for those things done in the past by people long since dead. But injustice is not just perpetrated by individuals but also by societies -often without even the conscious assent of individuals in that society. It is not that we who prosper in NZ should feel guilt about things in history over which we had no control, but that as a society we need to take responsibility for those members of our society who -also through no fault of their own- have inherited negative cultural legacies, and will inevitably be presented with a range of bad choices which the middle class will never face. So much crime is not actually a sign of a particular individual or group of people being inherently evil, but simply a symptom of a society in which whole groups of society are disenfranchised and dis-empowered before they are even born. Only when those imbalances have been redressed does it make sense to blame the individual alone for their bad decisions.

Part of the work of the church therefore is to bring justice to the criminal, to recognise that the one who sins has also been sinned against. It is so easy to prosecute a mugger, burglar, or murderer. It is much harder to prosecute the society that created the conditions in which that human would become a criminal. In taking responsibility for those who society has sinned against the church bears the burden of society's sins and creates a place of redemption where the criminal can find both forgiveness for what they did but also restoration for what was done to them. The church's unique demographic, composed as it is of self-confessed sinners in need of a saviour, leaves it uniquely qualified for the task. The church's Lord, the redeemer and renewer of all creation, means it is also uniquely called to that task.

If you like that, have a look at this. Either way, let me know what you think :)

Mercy and Justice in Islam and Christianity

David Neff writes in December's Christianity Today (p42):

"One insight from the "Loving God and Neighbor [sic] Together" dialogue between Muslims and Christians held this July at Yale University was the difference between our understandings of love, compassion, and mercy.
"The Christian participants had been taught by Jesus that love should be indiscriminate - just as the mercy shown by the Good Samaritan was conditioned on nothing but the wounded mans need. That may not be the way we generally behave, but... it is the standard against which we measure ourselves.
"The Muslim participants startled us Christians by talking about the limits their religion brought to their compassion. Orphans, widows, and others in need through no fault of their own deserve compassion, they said. But in Islamic ethics, there was no obligation to help the person whose drunkenness or gambling or otherwise unwise behavior [sic] put them in difficulty.
"Reflecting on what I heard those Muslim leaders say, the tension was not between a generous God and a stingy God... but between mercy that was defined and conditioned by justice (the Muslim view) and justice that was conditioned and defined by mercy (the Christian view)."

Now, pardon the long quote, but isn't that seriously interesting? Our view of God radically affects the way we view ourselves and treat other people. Some questions for discussion:

1. What advantages does the Muslim view hold?
2. If you were/are a Muslim how would you differentiate between those who were deserving of mercy and those who were not (e.g. an alchoholic orphan)?
3. If you (Mulsim/Christian/other) have ever received compassion what was it about you that brought compassion from others?
4. On what grounds do we (anybody) expect God to have compassion on us?
5. If you are a Christian how do you ensure that you love indiscriminately, like your God?

Let me know what you think :)

Transcendence, Poverty and Loneliness: Psalm 113

Who is like the Lord our God,
who is seated on high,
who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?
He raises the poor from the dust,
and lifts up the needy from the ash heap,
To make them sit with princes,
with the princes of his people.
He gives the barren woman a home,
Making her the joyous mother of children.
Praise the Lord! (Psalm 113:5-9)

One of the connections often missing in our theology is the link between worship and social justice, a link that is strongly made throughout the Bible (e.g. Isaiah 58; James 1:27). At first reading I thought that was what was going on here in Psalm 113. But then I realised this psalm isn't directly addressing human justice but God's. God's transcendant otherness is described analogically here as being 'on high,' above both the 'heavens and the earth.' This might suggest that God is not concerned with such earthly and material issues as poverty and social exclusion.* But that is not the case. Instead, from God's transcendant perspective ('who looks far down') that which is important is the poor and needy and those without the structures of support that enable human living. God's agenda is to elevate the lowly and to place the lonely in loving families.

There is a tendency among the religious that the more otherworldly, 'spiritual,' and 'holy,' our beliefs are, the less concerned we are with the material and human. Psalm 113 shows how far this misses the mark. Who is like the Lord our God? Those who are most like God are the ones whose transcendant perspective (Spirituality) causes them to love and serve the poor, needy and excluded. And this is what the God we worship is like. Praise the Lord!

* In the historical context of this psalm childlessness implied both social stigma and economic insecurity.