American Exceptionalism?

I find the budget blueprint published today by this administration deeply disturbing. Were it to be enacted, it would result in spending vast amounts of money on means to punish and to kill people, while radically cutting funds for means to foster quality of life and life itself, especially for those on the margins and at risk. Whether at home or abroad, we seem unwilling to commit public programs and money to keep people alive and well, the environment safe, land fruitful, culture vibrant, and peace in process; yet we seem more than willing to spend any amount of public funds to distance, denigrate, and destroy people we consider different and threatening. This will not "make America great again." It will make America a fortress state, diminished in moral compass inwardly and outwardly. It will be a long fall from what was once conceived as "a city upon a hill", a shining example for the world, to a security garrison based on a false and fearful pursuit of strength, absent of compassion, truth, beauty, or goodness. If this is America first, in the end it will be last.

The Kingdom Chronicles

Apparently the Vice President-elect on January 20, 2017, purposely will take the oath of office with his hand on a Bible open to 2 Chronicles 7:14. Yet this text cannot, if read properly in its original meaning, be applicable to the context of Christians in the United States, much less to the general population in this country. The United States is not, has never been, and never will become the land of God's people as Israel was the land of God's people at the time these words were written. The United States as a nation-state is not, never has been, and never will become the locus or vehicle of God's redemption of the earth and its people. Following Jesus, the church throughout the world (without identification with and reduction to any one people group or nation) is the locus and vehicle of God's redemption, for all the earth, for all people, with no most-favored nation status. We ill-construe and ill-serve the kingdom of God, our true citizenship, when we misrepresent Jesus and his cruciform re-creation of our world through such poor exegesis and application of God's Word.

To What Community Do We Belong?

To what community do we fundamentally belong? For followers of Jesus, the Church is that community. Our identity and allegiance root in and stem from our being in the Church. Certainly other communities to which we belong – nation, race, clan, gender, language, party, occupation, affinity, and more – shape and even "claim" us to greater or lesser degrees. Yet we must understand and pursue our essential belonging, our paramount and therefore focal identity and allegiance, in and through the community of the Church. We must subordinate, and in some ways and instances even refuse, claims from those other communities on our identity and allegiance, on our very life. To the extent we seek and experience the true commonweal of this world and of our individual life in it – trust and hope and love, and truth and beauty and goodness – we must do so fundamentally within and from the community, the society, which is the Church, which is ultimately the kingdom of God.

Good News?

Do we Christians, especially we American Christians, have a gospel, do we have good news, for the wretched of the earth? So much of what passes for the gospel in this country has virtually nothing to say to the vast majority of people who have lived, who now live, and who will live on this broken planet. The vast majority who live and die in obscurity, in poverty and hunger, in stunted and twisted bodies, in frustrated and damaged hearts and minds, in spirits tattered and shredded by their own sins and the sins of this world. So much of what we put forth as the Christian message is but a thin concoction of middle and upper middle class vanities far too oriented around bourgeois self-fulfillment and even self-aggrandizement. Where in the American gospel is the good news of Isaiah 35, the Magnificat, the Beatitudes, Matthew 11:28-30, Matthew 25:31-46, of Luke 4:16-21, of a crucified carpenter's son and itinerant healer and teacher off a dusty bypass of the Roman empire?

Some Thoughts on Romans 1:1-15

About twenty five years before Paul wrote this letter, Jesus was crucified outside of Jerusalem by Roman authorities with the consent of Jewish leaders. In the intervening period a Christian community arose in Rome. The time was now the middle 50s A.D., with a young Nero in his first years as emperor of the Roman empire.

When Paul wrote, he had never visited Rome. He certainly had not founded the church in Rome. Why then did Paul write? He, like other Christians around the Mediterranean, had heard of the faithfulness of Christians in Rome. He wrote to express his care for them and desire to see them. He also wrote to explain in some detail God’s good news in Jesus, the relationship of the Jewish people and Gentiles to God and to each other, and the ethical implications of being a follower of Jesus. Worthy of deep and prayerful study, this letter engages both our hearts and our minds.

This opening section of the letter consists of Paul’s introduction. It includes a greeting, commendation of the believers in Rome, Paul’s credentials as an apostle, and reasons for his writing. It also includes certain fundamental assertions about Jesus and our relationship to Jesus.

We should take special note of these assertions. From familiarity with church history and our life in the church, we may miss how striking they are, especially in original context. At the outset of this letter Paul reminded the Christians in Rome who really is the ruler of the world – of empires, nations, and people. Jesus is the Son of God and the Lord – not the emperor. Believers belong to Jesus – not to the Roman empire.

Questions of allegiance and identity are basic to life. They are certainly basic to Christian life. As Bob Dylan sang, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” At the outset of this letter, Paul makes clear that we serve Jesus. Our allegiance is to Jesus; our identity (our belonging) is formed in Jesus. Yes, we live in nations and societies of the world. Yes, they assert their claim on us. Yet, as we have been baptized into Jesus’ death and reborn in his resurrection, our hearts, our minds, our very lives belong to him first and last. May we let Jesus, not the world around us, shape our allegiance and identity deeply, fully, visibly.

Prosperity, Security, Shalom, and the Kingdom

In the Friday, July 25, 2008, Washington Post, I read an opinion piece by Michael Gerson on a recent biography of William Wilberforce by William Hague. In the final paragraph of his article, Gerson remarked that "Hague's life of Wilberforce should be read by every student of politics, to understand why mere prosperity and mere security will never be sufficient goals of evangelical political involvement."

While I concur about Wilberforce's example and look forward to reading this new biography, may I suggest that prosperity and security should never be proper goals for evangelical political involvement, at least not as they are often conceived by many evangelicals. It is very difficult for me, reading the New Testament, to imagine them to be goals that Jesus taught and sought for himself, or for his disciples and his church. Unless, I would argue, such prosperity and security are understood as the stuff of true shalom, the kingdom of God on earth, which is envisioned as ultimately encompassing all people and all peoples. Would then that we, Jesus’ followers, incarnated and pursued kingdom prosperity and security for all, not just for some, without inequity and injustice, without fear and conflict, both within societies and between societies. Yet I suspect that the prosperity and security pursued by evangelical political involvement, at least in the United States, are basically the bourgeois desires of relatively privileged segments of society and the regrettable conflation of Christianity with American nationalism. If I am correct, then they are not proper goals of Christian political involvement, for they fail the measure of that true prosperity and security which mark the blessings of God's shalom, God's kingdom, for all people across all divisions of privilege, affiliation, alienation, and enmity.

In God's Will

We American Christians tend far too much to the idea that placing ourselves in God’s will leads surely to the fulfillment of our (all too bourgeois) desires for this life: good job; good income; good family; good home; and the like. We neglect – even reject! – that when Christ placed himself squarely in God’s will it led to his crucifixion. “Not my will but thine be done.” We talk and preach of Jesus of Nazareth, God’s Christ, crucified and raised for us. Yet we live as if the cross were almost accidental to Christianity, as if it were actually incidental to Christian existence. Far from that, the cross is essential to Christianity and ineluctably fundamental to true Christian existence. The inevitable point at which God’s love and this world intersect is the cross. It is there that we find Jesus Christ, or we find him not at all.

A Note on American Identity

In one chapter of his most interesting book Radical Discontinuities: American Romanticism and Christian Consciousness (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1983), Harold P. Simonson writes of Per Hansa and Beret, a Norwegian immigrant couple on the northern plains of this country in the later 1800s in Ole Rol­vaag’s novel Giants in the Earth:

"When Per Hansa speaks repeatedly of “my King­dom,” it is not merely the few acres of land, the house, barn, and crops that he envisions but the power to possess and control these things, to claim owner­ship of them, and eventu­ally to see them and all nature as extensions of his being. Freed from time and its impinge­ments, he interprets space as total possibi­lity. By contrast, Beret thinks of herself as an inheritor, and all people as indebted to the past and rooted in it, dependent upon it for their well-being. She looks upon reality not as spatial exten­sion of ego, imagina­tion, and vision but as an already created world in which humans take their place as creatures. Insofar as they create any­thing, they do so within a creation already given and with origins deeper than what the mind imagines."

Simonson, I think, is acute in his as­sessment of these types manifest in the characters, Per Hansa and Beret. Speaking of Per Hansa, Simonson typi­fies what may be called the American perspec­tive in this way: “Freed from time and its im­pinge­ments, he interprets space as total possi­bility.” Then in relation to Beret, Simonson typifies what may be called the Euro­pean per­spective as “in­heri­tor...as indebted to the past and rooted in it, depen­dent upon it for...­well-being.” It seems to me that one could see in these types the peculiar dilemma of the American Chris­tian, the peculiar ambiguity within which the American Christian must work out salvation in fear and trem­bling. Consider the follow­ing.

The Puritans came from England to this continent, where, as if shocked into new and startled aware­ness by diving into the cold waters of the Atlan­tic, they emer­ged on these shores with a consciousness of passage from one place and time to a new place and time. But the newness was itself new, and so the difficulty was in foreseeing the implications of this new place and time for the consciousness of an American self. They stood at the brink of an American self wrestling with identity, but as yet they were not consciously “American.” Certainly, the conditions for ambiguity and ambivalence in identity were incipient: they foresaw the possibilities of new directions and forms open to them in this stran­ge and wondrous land; but they still looked back to their roots in Europe in various ways, and so for long con­sidered themselves part of a trans-Atlan­tic community. Yet, as indicated, the newness was itself new, and in the early colonial decades they were only coming to a sense of being “American.” Besides which, certain controlling religious concepts no doubt gave them a relatively clear and strong identity. For example, with their sense of historical type and anti-type within the provi­dence of God, they were not concerned to jet­tison all time past (history) in favor of space as limit­less possibility. Moreover, a sense of mis­sion or “er­rand” to the New and the Old Worlds may have muted the ambi­valence they might other­wise have felt over the diver­gent pulls of the old (history, tradition, cultural heri­tage, time and space as neces­sity, esta­blished forms) and the new (time and land as space, space as freedom and possibility, open­ness and indeed pressure for change of established for­ms). Still, it must be seen that the conditions for the peculiar dilemma, the peculiar ambiguity, of the American Christian were incipient with the first steps of these European emigrants on the western shores of the cold Atlantic.

But the American romantics – for example, Whitman in his Preface to “Leaves of Grass” (1855) and in “Demo­cratic Vistas” – sought to resolve the ambiguity and ambi­valence of American iden­tity by elimi­nating such. How? By severing the pull of the old. Their imperative: exalt the American self; loose it from its old ties; set it sail­ing on the vast expanse of the new. Declare this self as new and limit­less, as seemed the very land in which the American dwelt. Exhort it to slough off the stuff of the old and revel in the inexpressible glories of its capa­cious new environment.

However, Ameri­can romanticism could do so only insofar as it diverged from traditional Christianity, for this Christi­anity knew and preached that the self and human life had limits, constraints, neces­sities. It taught that exis­tence, more vast than and prior to any individual or aggre­gate self, was not compre­hensible or imaginable by the self, American or otherwise. Indeed, this Christianity admonished the self against the fundamental sin – namely, pride, the attempted usurpation of the divine being and acting. Furthermore, it grounded truth and “authentic” being in history – in the incarnation, cruci­fixion, resurrection, ascension, and parousia of Jesus. It forced the Christian to hold firmly to both poles, past and future.

Hence, the peculiar dilemma, the peculiar ambiguity, of the American Chris­tian. To cut loose from the past electrifies with the promise of the pos­sible, of the new. The spaciousness of the land is indeed inbred. There it pos­sesses and shapes the very form of the soul. To cut loose; to dive into the cold waters and emerge with spanking new awareness in the land of promise; to shake off the old and find the light bright and swept free of motes of dust: these possibilities vivify the very core of the American self. Yet the Chris­tian in America cannot unam­big­uously or unambiva­lently be this American self, for the Chris­tian knows the significance of the past – Cal­vary catches up and tran­scends the Rocky Mountains. The Christian knows that the new offers peril as well as promise. The Chris­tian knows the penultimate and the ulti­mate pangs and losses in the jettisoning of the past. The Christian knows the ambiguity of time and space: together and separately, they offer promise and threat­; they signify gain and loss, inextricably mixed. Time and space are both blessing and curse. To move on is to leave behind. To stay behind is never to move. Time and space invigorate and pull with the promise of possi­bility. Just as surely, they weaken structure and deliver longing and loneli­ness. The Ameri­can Christian can do no other than grasp – as one would grasp a plow, or a cross – the ambiguity, the peculiar dilemma, the hard glory.