Ambassadors Of Reconciliation

A M B A S S A D O R S



O F

R E C O N C I L I A T I O N BOOK DISCUSSION & REFLECTION

Michael. J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology. Grand Rapids & Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009. 194-pp. ISBN-10: 0802862659;

ISBN-13: 978-0802862655 (pbk), $24.00 (U.S.) Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ1

SCRIPTURAL BASIS FOR RESTORATIVE JUSTICE & PEACEM AKING Marcus Barth, the son of the great German Christian theologian, Karl Barth, once claimed that “To say, ‘Christ’ means to say ‘reconciliation’ or to say ‘peace.’”2 What Barth alludes to is a physical, materialist in-time embodiment of reconciliation and peace. This is far from an emasculated, pietistic peace-of-mind or out-of-time individual ‘spiritual’ experience reading the Psalms in the comfort of one’s own home or attending church liturgy on Sunday morning. 3 For Saint Paul, Christianity is, if nothing else, a timeful community of revolutionary God-seekers. But, revolutionaries of a sort that are so radical and counter-cultural that their modus operandi to achieve an overturn of the established order is through nonviolence and restorative justice towards their enemies (those who oppress them). If anyone can conjure up a more unlikely and unbelievable premise in the history of humankind for achieving safety and liberation of the human spirit, please come forward. Recent real-life practitioners of this political theology were Ghandi, Martin Gorman makes the point that Bonheoffer “recognizes at the end of the day that discipleship is not about imitation or even obedience to an external call or norm. It is about transformation, theosis” (170). See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 4, Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, trans. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 2001) discussed in Gorman 2009, 168-173. . 1

Marcus Barth, The Broken Wall: A Study of the Epistle to the Ephesians (Valley Forge: Judson, 1959), 44 quoted in Ched Myers & Elaine Enns, Ambassadors of Reconciliation, vol 1 New Testament Reflections on Restorative Justice and Peacemaking (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009), xi. 2

Christian spirituality is only genuinely personal when practiced communally. “It is recognizable and intelligible only when it relates fully to one’s neighbor.” “It is not enough to ‘do religious things’ regularly.” See Michael Battle, Ubuntu: I in You and You in Me (New York: Seabury Books, 2009), 87-9. 3

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH --- Saturday, November 7, 2009

Page 1 of 10

A M B A S S A D O R S

O F

R E C O N C I L I A T I O N

Luther King Jr., and the Living in the Truth movement in Eastern Europe that brought down the Soviet Union peacefully between 1989-91. 4 Today, the practice of Christianity is so far from this vision of Saint Paul that adiphorization (the suspension of the ethical and moral from everyday decision-making) and nationalistic quietism (whatever the state says or does is fine by us - thus, support for lingering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a health system that disenfranchises the poor, etc.) characterize many of the mainline churches. A false form of secular, conservative humanism that is actually anti-Christian often characterizes the nondenominational ‘Christian’ (in name only) churches of America. How are we to reclaim Saint Paul’s vision of ekklesia - a community of countercultural God-seekers? That is where Mike Gorman’s Inhabiting the Cruciform God offers important insights.

POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH KENOSIS What Dr. Gorman claims is that the central Master Story of Saint Paul is Philippians 2:6-11. In this passage, Paul is developing a political theology in direct contrast with the imperial ideology of Rome. Christ, instead of buying into the ideology of power and violence to exploit others for his own advantage, relinquishes this power (“emptied himself”) and humbles himself “by becoming obedient to death - even on a cross.” This is Christ’s kenotic act. An event in time that changes the world from here on out. 5 The hermeneutical turn that Dr. Gorman makes is that not only is Christ’s kenosis the model for humans going forward, but that through Christ, God is telling us some-

For a description of a “Living in the Truth” manifest, see Vaclav Havel, “Spirit of the Earth,” Resurgence, November-December 1998, 30. 4

For Badiou, an event is that moment of being confronted by (and overwhelmed by) a truth. But, this truth is better defined as a wager than a fact. A decision to accept something that is neither fully calculable, knowable or demonstrable, “and for which the results [consequences] cannot be known [fully] in advance, but to which the subject declares his faith.” See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. R. Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University 5

Press, 2003), 45 discussed in Marcus Pound, Zizek: a (very) critical introduction (Grand Rapids & Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008), 78.

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009

Page 2 of 10

A M B A S S A D O R S

O F

R E C O N C I L I A T I O N

thing about his self-identity. That is, that kenosis = theosis. What defines God is his immanence and self-limitation, not primarily his power and transcendence. 6 By taking this stance on kenosis of Christ/God as self-revelatory, Gorman is making a wager on a temporal world defined by an unfolding, non-humanocentric universe 7 (“open theology”) rather than the block universe of classical theology (e.g. Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas). In the block universe physical view of temporality, there is no ontological difference between past, present, and future. A transcendent God stands outside the temporal realm with His divine gaze, totum simul, the ultimate final cause of all things. Open theology, on the other hand, pictures a kenotic God (divine condescension and self-limitation) whose absolute nature is qualified by: (a) temporality is operative (i.e. the four arrows of time exist in reality); 8 (b) the process of natural evolution (the history of creation is unfolding); and (c) God exhibits current omniscience rather than absolute omniscience (God condescends to act providentially as a cause among causes).9 Where both the classical non-kenotic God and open, kenotic-God theology encounter a difficult philosophical conundrum is how to treat indeterminacy. Physicists have two choices. The first is to accept Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (a physically determined epistemological limitation on what can be measured and known about reality) as an ontological principle of indeterminacy. The second choice is to accept David Bohm’s proposal that indeterminacy arises essentially from a deterministic

God’s kenosis might be thought of as God’s love through which creation comes to being and through which He “redeems creation through the outpouring of the divine life made known in Christ” (Battle, 45-7). 6

Non-humanocentric in that all of God’s good creation is taken account of, not just the present desires of humankind. This also opens up a theology capable of handing non-terrestrial life and even the discovery and acceptance of non-human intelligent life-forms within a common, universal theology. 7

The four arrows of time include: (a) the arrow of deep time - cosmic history from the big bang to the present; (b) the thermodynamic arrow of time that points towards increasing entropy (disorder) of natural systems; (c) biologic arrow of time that tends toward systems of ever greater complexity (i.e. the evolution of life); and (d) the “the psychological arrow, pointing from a past that we can remember towards a future that we do not yet know.” See John Polk8

inghorne, Theology in the Context of Science (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009), 65. 9

Polkinghorne, 58, 60, 62-63.

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009

Page 3 of 10

A M B A S S A D O R S

O F

R E C O N C I L I A T I O N

and necessary ignorance - i.e. humans are not God, are limited, and everything they physically measure or attempt to understand will have gaps. 10 Theologians might see God’s/Christ’s self-revelatory, self-chosen kenosis not as just “unfortunate patches of unavoidable ignorance (epistemological deficits), but they will be seen as signs of some form of openness in physical process (ontological opportunities).” I believe that this theological openness is what enables Gorman to make the links between Christ’s kenosis, God’s self-revelation, cruciformity and theosis in Paul’s theology. In Gorman’s estimation, humans exhibit God-like form (theosis) by their cocruciform (following the kenotic model of Christ) living into an engaged participatory stance that seeks justice and peace. Paul ascribes to these progressive/ transformative movements of human liberation through non-violence. This nonviolence and restorative justice is what characterizes Christ’s/God’s archetype for apprehending reality and model for living in the world. Gorman describes this process as cruciformity and believes this is the basis for not only Paul’s participatory, political spirituality but the impetus for his public and communal vision for and activity of community-building ekkelsiai. The ekkelsia are nothing less than communities for the support of like-minded, counter-cultural, revolutionary persons. Paul’s ‘spirituality’ was anything but pietistic. His spirituality was action-oriented and directional - always moving toward full liberation of the human condition toward communion (pistis - faith) with/in Christ/God through the Spirit.11 For Paul, the work of the Spirit is this active molding of the Christian into the kenotic likeness of Christ (71). Dr. Gorman is a New Testament scholar, familiar with the Greek in Paul’s letters and in full conversation with the exegetical literature on Paul, both recent and historical. 12 Instead of God abandoning Christ on the cross, or Jesus’ cry on the cross being that of dereliction or acknowledgement of the death of the Big Other (as Lacan might sug10

Polkinghorne, 81-2.

For a detailed discussion of Paul’s cruciform spirituality see Michael Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 11

See Michael J. Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and His Letters (Grand Rapids & Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004). 12

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009

Page 4 of 10

A M B A S S A D O R S

O F

R E C O N C I L I A T I O N

gest), 13 Gorman might suggest this kenotic event opens up a whole new political way of being-in-the-world. A political stance of engagement with the world where power and influence are no longer the supreme currency that produces progressive change. Instead of the normative Roman cursus honorum (“the elite’s upward-bound race for honors”), cursus pudorum (“downward mobility”), a radical, counter-cultural kenotic witness to injustice and violence is proposed. Paul in his epistles is doing nothing less than “reconstructing the meaning of God’s essential attributes and thus the meaning of divinity itself” (27). From this vantage, Gorman takes on the exegetical task of redefining what Paul means by justification. First, Gorman establishes through his exegetical work that “Christ’s death is a unified act of faith toward God and love toward others” (62). Christ’s love and faith are inseparable. Thus, for Paul, “justification - restoration to right covenant relations with God and others - occurs, not through performance of or zeal for the Law, but through participation in Christ’s quintessential act of covenant-keeping” (63) - his cruciformity. Mike Gorman in his Inhabiting the Cruciform God provides a solid exegetical platform for future work in political theology. Hats off to him for this stellar interpretation of the Apostle Paul’s radical and rejuvenating theology. The book is important for what it says about what Christian community and ekklesia might look like in a 21st Century world. Maybe most importantly is what this work on Paul recommends for Christian self-referentiality (i.e. I am ‘Christian’ because I claim that I am vs. I am Christian because of my co-cruciform living-in-relation-with/in Christ). For example, would ‘Christian’ policy-makers choose counter-violence as the primary political recourse after 9/11? The 9/11 terrorist attacks resulted in almost 3,000 dead humans and $90 billion in property damage. But the U.S. violence-drenched response to 9/11 resulted in more than two million humans, dead, maimed or displaced from their homes and more than $3,000 billion in property damage and cost. Dr. Gorman’s book offers an antidote to this conventional, never-ending mimetic violence. A political theology for breaking-out of the cycle of a false-theology of utility (according to an elite, humanocentric, and often nationalistic utilitarianism) that

For Zizek, these two interpretive choices provide the basis for his political stance where “politics is a matter of faith... an absolute commitment where one risks everything for the unknown, because only where there is risk, is there passion” (Pound, 13, 26). 13

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009

Page 5 of 10

A M B A S S A D O R S

O F

R E C O N C I L I A T I O N

comes ‘wrapped’ in the cloth of Christianity. That is why anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear (Ezek. 12:2; Matt. 13:15-16; Mark 4:9, 23, 8:18; Luke 8:8, 14:35; Rom. 11:8) should engage with the ideas presented in Inhabiting a Cruciform God. In my view the world needs these ideas and insights if we are to prevail.

THEOLOGY MATTERS Theology matters. For Saint Paul, all theology is political. All politics is theological. The empire that Paul formed ekklesia as a counter to was the Roman Empire: Pax Romana (“peace and security”) was the official theology and propaganda “motto of the Roman world after the establishment of the Principate, that is, after Augustus’ miraculous termination of the civil war and his establishment of ‘universal peace’” and economy supported, to a large extent, by the slave labor of conquered peoples. The Principate was a political theology that assumed that the Roman empire contained “the chosen people of God” and was the divine vehicle to defeat the forces of chaos in the world and to restore heavenly order in the form of a return to the “garden” of the former Republic. 14 In this theopolitical realm, the emperor was the paterfamilias of all the people (called “Father”), deified and became the sole ruler of a universe where taxis (order) was the primary aim of social and political structures achieved through a culture of meritocracy based on paideia (concept of heroic engagement and sacrifice for the good of the state), competition, and nomos (the law) imposed through coercion and force. Justice (iustitia) was first and foremost defined as that which was beneficial to Rome and its citizens. All this is documented in the Acts of Augustus written in Greek on the walls of the numerous temples to Augustus, recounting the salvific power of the gospel of Caesar. This was a gospel that singled out the elite individual set apart by success--allegedly for the benefit of the whole society. For example, “Following the violent death of Claudius, the senate decreed his consecratio i.e. not only his life after death but also his assumption and apotheosis” (the elevation or exaltation of a person to the rank of a god). The most penetrating political commentary on this system of empire occurs in the letters of Saint Paul.

On the ‘Recovery of Eden’ myth, see Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden (New York & London: Routledge, 2004). 14

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009

Page 6 of 10

A M B A S S A D O R S

O F

R E C O N C I L I A T I O N

Paul challenges the soteria (salvation from the forces of chaos) represented by Caesar and his empire by claiming that pistis (God’s loyalty/faithfulness) is universal and democratic, that it applies to all people regardless of their class, race, gender, wealth or accomplishments and status in the world and this is expressed in God’s dikaiosyne (solidarity and justice) with the entire human race, not just the elite. Paul describes how those who claim to be superior or privileged, instead of making the world better, just cause more chaos and bring on catastrophe [echoes of the snake in Gen 2-3 that offers ‘superior wisdom’ that leads only to disaster]. Instead, Paul offers Jesus as the exemplar of an archetypal human/divine being who, through his faith of God, signifies what real peace and security looks like - not a hegemony or authority of domination and oppression, but the prototype of a community pledged to life. Paul goes on to describe this community pledged to life, the ekklesia, an exemplary community of those who are set free from the false precepts of empiric power where, instead, identity is shaped by a radical democracy of justice, difference, freedom, equality, and solidarity that set the ethical conditions; where the critical events “for the fate of the universe does not come to pass in heaven with God or among the gods. It does not involve force or violence or even the Law. It takes place within and through a community held together by faith, love, and hope.”15 For Paul, The kingdom of heaven [God] was a standard religious code phrase meaning an inbreaking of the divine realm into the realm of Caesar, Herod Antipas, Pilate, etc. - olam-ha-bah (‘the world to come’). This vision relies on the view that the world we live in can be repaired (tikkun olam); that a better world is possible through communal action. 16 Thus, “the kingdom of heaven is not, for the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, a piece of real estate for the single saved soul; it is a communal vision of what could be and what should be. It is a vision of a time when all debt are forgiven, when we stop judging others, when we not only wear our traditions on our sleeve, but also hold

See Dieter Georgi, Theocracy: In Paul’s Praxis and Theology, trans., David E. Green (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 28, 34, 45, 59, 66, 67, 68, 71, 76, 86, 97, 99 from Lyle Brecht, “The God Who Sacrifices His Desire and Gives Hope to all Creation: An Exegesis of Genesis 2:4b-3:24” (March 2008) available at http://www.pdfcoke.com/doc/10062312/ 15

The essence of Ubuntu theology: “The reason two antelopes walk together is so that one may blow the dust from the other’s eyes.” “Ubuntu is more about participation in the process of becoming lovable persons” within community. This love “is impartial, unconditional, and objective” (Battle, 21, 37, 98). 16

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009

Page 7 of 10

A M B A S S A D O R S

O F

R E C O N C I L I A T I O N

them in our hearts and minds and enact them with all our strength. It is the good news that the Torah can be discussed and debated, when the Sabbath is truly honored and kept holy, when love of enemies replaces the tendency toward striking back.”17 What Paul was full cognizant of is that “Jesus did not die because he taught that the poor would have an easier time getting into heaven than the rich; he did not die because he rejected Torah; he did not die because he preached love of God and love of neighbor. He died because... in Roman-occupied Jerusalem [he was making a political statement that the established order did not appreciate].... He died under the criminal charge of sedition: Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews” - as a political dissenter.18 What would Saint Paul have to say about the present situation in the world? During 2008 for example, the nations of the world spent nearly $1,500 billion (U.S.) on their military forces for the purported purpose of national defense. 19 In the past 64-years, since the end of WWII, the total spent on national defense globally is around $60,000 billion. One consequence of this massive, ongoing diversion of global resources (human, economic, scientific and technological capital) from meeting basic human needs is the continued immiseration of many billions of the earth’s human population and the the neglect of pressing critical global environmental, social, and economic issues. As President Dwight Eisenhower stated in 1953: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. 20

Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 51-2. 17

18

Levine, 222.

Defense budgets in 2008 were: United States - $607 billion, China - $85 billion, France - $66 billion, Britain - $65 billion and Russia - $59 billion. The world total represents an increase of 45% in military-related budgets (in constant dollars) over the past 10-years (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). 19

20

Eisenhower ’s “Chance for Peace” Speech on 16 April 1953.

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009

Page 8 of 10

A M B A S S A D O R S

O F

R E C O N C I L I A T I O N

Maybe the most obvious weakness to allocating so much of the world’s capital to national military preparedness is that it often fails to protect nations from the war and destruction it is supposed to prevent. Dr. Gorman, through his imaginative and scholarly reading of Paul’s letters, offers an alternative, counter-cultural political theology to this normative, imperial stance of defense through force and counterviolence. What if Christians actually lived into the faith and vision of community that Paul illuminates? That Gorman exegetes as kenosis = theosis. Where true faith in Christ embodies “a countercultural life of fidelity and love, generosity and justice, purity and promise-keeping, nonviolence and peacemaking” (172). Might only then, Christians actually become the ambassadors of reconciliation envisioned by Saint Paul? 21 What Dr. Gorman does is remind us living today of the passion and radicalness of Paul’s preaching via his epistles, read aloud to the various congregations of ekklesia to whom his letters were addressed. Paul, in his act of interpretation of Scripture was “engaged in world making.”22 This new ‘life world’ so constructed is always provisional, subject to change based on new data, fresh perspectives, new experiences, and changed circumstances. The intent of this imaginative ‘world making’ from the text is to describe a counter-reality to the banal day-to-day “that can be appropriated, [and] out of which the community is authorized and permitted to live a different kind of life.”23 According to Walter Brueggemann, in presenting this counter-world, this world defined by the kingdom of God (heaven), Paul had only four strategies to choose from: “To present a ‘world of transformation’ to those who yearn and hope for transformation. This is done when oppressed or marginalized people are invited to

“So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20, NRSV). But unlike the ambassadors of Rome (Gk. presbeutes; Lat. legatus) who represented imperial interests, Paul’s vision is of disciples of Christ encountering the world, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, with “unarmed truth and unconditional love 21

will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant” (quoted in Myers and Enns, 14). See Walter Brueggemann, The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 96. 22

23

Brueggemann, 97.

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009

Page 9 of 10

A M B A S S A D O R S

O F

R E C O N C I L I A T I O N

hope for the basic changes of social reality that are given in the texts for transformation; “To present ‘a world of equilibrium’ to those who wait and yearn for transformation. This is done when oppressed or marginalized people are invited to accept and participate in the present regime as their proper duty and their only hope; “To present ‘a world of transformation’ to those who value the status quo and do not want the world changed. This is when those who benefit from present social arrangements are called, in the face of that benefit, to submit to change as the will and work of God; “To present ‘a world of equilibrium’ to those who crave equilibrium and regard the present social world as the best of all possible world, a world decreed by God. This is done when religion becomes a comfortable endorsement of the status quo.”24 For Paul, his intent was to counter a Roman consciousness that assumed “that the world is a closed, fixed, fated given.”25 Paul’s message was an “offer of another world.”26 His good news of Christ was to open this “closed system of reality to newness.” 27 What Gorman is re-visioning for us today is Paul’s “summons to the reality that is in the end our God-given true self and true community.”28 This is a world in which “we know to be God’s live word that utters, shatters, destroys, and creates” a world worth fighting for and living in today. 29 “[B]y the power of the Spirit of Father and Son, the new people, the new humanity bears witness in word and deed to that glorious future by participating now in the life and mission of the triune cruciform God.”30

24

Brueggemann, 99.

25

Brueggemann, 100.

26

Brueggemann, 101.

27

Brueggemann, 3.

28

Brueggemann, 43.

29

Brueggemann, 45.

30

Gorman 2009, 173.

LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009

Page 10 of 10