Continuing our Friday series where we highlight search terms that have brought people to the blog.

This week's search terms:

religionless christianity

In 2010 I did a four-part series "Letters from Cell 92" about the theology of Deitrich Bonhoeffer as expressed in his enigmatic Letters and Papers from Prison. Cell 92 was the cell in Tegel prison where Bonhoeffer wrote most of his letters to Eberhard Bethge.

Letters and Papers from Prison (LPP) is a bit of a Rorschach blot. Bonhoeffer's reflections are provocative but fragmentary and incomplete. Consequently, it is difficult to tell how connected Bonhoeffer's prison reflections are with his prior theological work. Was Bonhoeffer making a radical theological break from the past or were the prison reflections simply the outworking of his ongoing theological project?

These questions are most acute when we get to Bonhoeffer's reflections about something he described as "religionless Christianity."

What is "religionless Christianity" for Bonhoeffer?

Some have taken Bonhoeffer to have been articulating a "death of God" theology, a form of Christian a/theism. Much of this interpretation is based upon this passage in LPP (taken from Part 3 of my series):

July 16, 1944

To Eberhard Bethge:

...And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [translation: "as if there were no God"]. And this is just what we do recognize--before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.

According to Bonhoeffer we are to live in the world etsi deus non daretur, as if there were no God. God asks us to live in the world "without God as a working hypothesis." Thus, before God and with God we live without God.

What does Bonhoeffer mean by this?

On the surface the notion of etsi deus non daretur jibes well with death of God and a/theistic interpretations of religionless Christianity, but these struggle with how we should understand our living "without God" as being done "before God" and "with God."

How can religionless Christianity be godless and a/theistic if it done before God and with God?

It is Eberhard Bethge's interpretation of religionless Christianity, with I tried to summarize in Part 4 of the series, that Bonhoeffer wasn't making a death of God or a/theistic move. According to Bethge what Bonhoeffer was doing was trying to combat a "false transcendence" with a radically incarnational view of transcendence, finding God not up in a heaven but in "the neighbor who is within reach."

To be sure, death of God and a/theistic approaches are trying to accomplish something very similar, finding God in immanent, human relationships rather than in cultic, transcendent practices. But the death of God and a/theistic approaches would not see these immanent, human relationships as being lived out "before God" or "with God." They are God, with no remainder. You can see the distinction between this view and Bohoeffer's in his discussions in LPP of the "discipline of the secret" or the "arcane discipline."

I discuss the "arcane discipline" in Part 5 of my series. The "arcane discipline" goes back to the days of the early church. After baptism new Christians were read the creed "in secret" and were told to memorize it and never write it down. The creed--as the mystery of the faith--held power and was to be the secret possession of the faithful. These secrets were not to be revealed to the world.

This seems to be what Bonhoeffer means by "religionless," but with a twist. The faith of the believer is never publicly declared, shared or practiced before the world. Faith is a secret and, thus, to the world looks "religionless." The confession of faith is expressed morally and ethically rather than verbally or ritualistically. The best description of what this looks like comes from Bonhoeffer himself, from a sermon he delivered in 1932:

Confession of faith is not to be confused with professing a religion. Such profession uses the confession as propaganda and ammunition against the Godless. The confession of faith belongs rather to the "Discipline of the Secret" in the Christian gathering of those who believe. Nowhere else is it tenable...

The primary confession of the Christan before the world is the deed which interprets itself. If this deed is to have become a force, then the world will long to confess the Word. This is not the same as loudly shrieking out propaganda. This Word must be preserved as the most sacred possession of the community. This is a matter between God and the community, not between the community and the world. It is a word of recognition between friends, not a word to use against enemies. This attitude was first learned at baptism. The deed alone is our confession of faith before the world.

Faith is a secret, a word between friends. Nowhere else is it tenable. Most importantly, faith is never expressed as a judgment of or against the world, as a weapon against enemies. The world should only see our love, a love that will be expressed godlessly, religionlessly.

Religionless Christianity is the deed which interprets itself, for the deed alone is our confession of faith before the world.

Today we reach the end of William Stringfellow's An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land.

After discussing the spiritual gifts in Chapter 6 Stringfellow turns to answer a question he asks at the start of the chapter:

If Americans are dehumanized by the violence of babel and brutalized in the social chaos wrought by the demonic powers and principalities, how can a person live?

How can a person live? How can a person live in the midst of death, in the face of demonic, dehumanizing forces?

In answer Stringfellow revisits the theme from Chapter 5: Resistance. Resistance toward death is the only human way to live. Resistance is what gives us hope:

Where is hope?

The biblical response--again, an answer which also has empirical authority--is that hope is known only in the midst of coping with death...It is a person's involvement in that crisis in itself--whatever the apparent outcome--which is the definitively humanizing experience. Engagement in specific and incessant struggle against death's rule renders us human. Resistance to death is the only way to live humanly in the midst of the Fall.

It is the incessant struggle against death that humanizes us. Resistance to death is the only human way to live.

This is the notion--resistance to death is what makes us human--that sits behind Stringfellow's argument at the end of the book that Christian ethics is inherently sacramental in nature. The issue in Christian ethics, for Stringfellow, is less about adjudicating right vs. wrong. To be sure that's a vital and critical piece. You always have to do what you discern to be right. It's just that life in the Fall is so morally confused and complicated that you will never know that you were right. You try to do right. You just have no guarantees that you are right. As Stringfellow describes it:

[T]he issue of biblical ethics is not expressed in vain efforts to divine the will of God in this or that particular situation. On the contrary, biblical ethics asks how to live humanly in the midst of death's reign. And biblical politics, therefore, as it manifests resistance to the power of death, is, at once, celebration of human life in society. Or by parable, biblical politics means the practice of the vocation to live as Jerusalem, the holy nation, amidst Babylon...

Biblical living discloses that the ethical is sacramental, not moralistic or pietistic or religious.

The best that you can strive for, according to Stringfellow, is to resist death, to live humanly in the midst of death. Thus, Christian ethics is less about being right than about being a sign of life--a sacrament--in the midst of death. Christian ethics is about being a human being in the face of dehumanizing forces, no more, no less.

Living humanly in the Fall is such a sacrament, a sacranmt and sign of life in the midst of death.

As Stringfellow summarizes at the very end of the book:

To be ethical is to live sacramentally...

In resistance persons live most humanly. No to death means yes to life.

We've reached Chapter 6, the last chapter of William Stringfellow's An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. In this post I want to summarize Stringfellow thoughts concerning the charismatic gifts. In the next and final post of this series I'll share Stringfollow final reflections from the book regarding the sacramental nature of Christian ethics.

Continuing his practical focus from Chapter 5, Stringfellow discusses the charismatic gifts in Chapter 6 and how the gifts support our resistance to death, how the gifts humanize life in the Fall.

For Stringfellow the foundational gift is "discerning the spirits." According to Stringfellow "discerning the signs and spirits" is learning to read the world biblically, which means apocalyptically and eschatologically. Two fancy words there. For Stringfellow, reading the world apocalyptically means discerning truth from lies in the dehumanizing forces facing us in the world. Apocalypse means "unveiling." Discerning the spirits is lifting the veil of lies to see the forces of death at work in the background, the forces we cannot see because of the babel produced by the principalities and powers. For Stringfellow, reading the world eschatologically is placing those dehumanizing forces under judgment and living in hope.

Stringfellow describing the gift of discernment:

Discerning signs has to do with comprehending the remarkable in common happenings, with perceiving the saga of salvation within the era of the Fall. It has to do with the ability to interpret ordinary events in both apocalyptic and eschatological connotations, to see portents of death where others find progress or success but, simultaneously, to behold tokens of the reality of Resurrection or hope where others are consigned to confusion or despair. Discerning the signs does not seek spectacular proofs or await the miraculous, but, rather, it means sensitivity to the Word of God indwelling in all Creation and transfiguring common history, while remaining radically realistic about death's vitality in all that happens.

This is one of my most favorite Stringfellow passages. What is the gift of discernment? It is discerning the remarkable in common happenings. Perceiving the saga of Salvation all around us. Interpreting ordinary events in biblical ways. Seeing portents of death where others find progress and success. And finding tokens of resurrection where there is confusion and despair.

In summarizing the gift of discernment Stringfellow says, "In the midst of babel, speak the truth."

Truth telling--reading the world biblically--is a charismatic gift that allows us to find and care for our humanity in the midst of the Fall.

Stringfellow goes on to describe three other gifts--speaking in tongues, healing and exorcism. In each case Stringfellow is less concerned with the personal and "miraculous" experience of these gifts than with the political character of the charismatic gifts:

It spares Christians, and others, the pitfalls of vain, exotic, individualistic, and exclusive views of the charismatic gifts to treat them, as the Bible does, politically...

Each and every charismatic gift is concerned with the restoration and renewal of human life in society. All have to do with how, concretely, human beings are enabled to cope with the multiple and variegated claims of death. The charismatic gifts furnish the only powers to which humans have access against the aggressions of the principalities. The gifts dispel idolatry and free human beings to celebrate Creation, which is, biblically speaking, integral to the worship of God. The gifts equip persons to live humanly in the midst of the Fall. The exercise of these gifts constitutes the essential tactics of resistance to the power of death.

Speaking in tongues at Pentecost expressed "the emancipation of human beings from the bonds of nation, culture, race, language, ethnicity." Speaking in tongues recognizes a universal humanity--of which the church is a sign--stripped of the false divisions created and maintained by the principalities and powers.

More, speaking in tongues represents the ability of the church to speak freely and spontaneously in the midst of babel. Speaking in tongues represents the church speaking in her own voice and language. Life-giving words that cannot be co-opted, controlled or censored by the powers.

Healing is less about physical healing than a declaration that the threat of death--a threat made by the powers--holds no fear for the confessing community. Consequently, a community freed from the threat of death falls outside systems of control as death is the means of coercion wielded by the powers, the state especially. As Stringfellow says,

To so surpass death is utterly threatening politically, it shakes and shatters the very foundation of political reality because death is, as has been said, the only moral and political sanction of the State...[Resurrection exemplifies] life transcending the moral power of death in this world and this world's strongholds and kingdoms.

Finally, exorcism is casting out the spirituality of death. Exorcism, thus, sits at the heart of the Christian resistance to death. As Stringfellow points out, the Lord's Prayer is itself "a form of exorcism." In invoking God and asking for protection from "evil" and "the evil one" the Lord's Prayer is a "act of exorcism."

Stringfellow goes on to describe how exorcism can be expressed as "sacramental protest" against the forces of death. For example, he describes the actions of the Catonsvile Nine, who burned Vietnam draft cards with homemade napalm while saying the Lord's Prayer, as a "liturgy of exorcism."

Such are the practices, according to Stringfellow, which humanize life during the Fall.

Link to Epilogue

Having described the nature and stratagems of the principalities and powers in Chapters 3 and 4 of An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land in Chapter 5 Stringfellow finally turns to practical matters, the subject of spiritual warfare.

How are we to resist the moral and spiritual influence of the principalities and powers upon us?

For inspiration Stringfellow turns to the resistance movement in Europe during the Nazi occupation. Stringfellow visited Europe after WW II and had a chance to talk to many within the resistance movement. How had they resisted the Nazi occupation? How did they maintain their conscience and humanity living within a dehumanizing and oppressive regime?

For Stringfellow, the actions of the resistance movement provide lessons for "Christians and other aliens living in a strange land," a world controlled by the principalities and powers:

[T]wo matters from those firsthand exposures to the realities of the Resistance against Nazism have particular pertinence to the contemporary malaise of Americans because of their relevance to the practical situation prevailing in the nation.

What are these two lessons learned from the resistance movement?

The first lesson is that humanity, sanity and conscience are preserved by small, daily actions of resistance and subversion. Acts so small that they seems nearly pointless, even foolhardy given the risk/reward ratio involved:

[T]he Resistance, undertaken and sustained through the long years of the Nazi ascendancy in which most of Western Europe was conquered and occupied, consisted, day after day, of small efforts. Each one of these, if regarded in itself, seems far too weak, too temporary, too symbolic, too haphazard, too meek, too trivial to be efficacious against the oppressive, monolithic, pervasive presence which Nazism was, both physically and psychically, in the nations which had been defeated and seized. Realistically speaking, those who resisted Nazism did so in an atmosphere in which hope, in its ordinary connotations, had been annihilated. To calculate their actions--abetting escapes, circulating mimeographed news, hiding fugitives, obtaining money or needed documents, engaging in various forms of noncooperation with the occupying authorities or the quisling bureaucrats, wearing armbands, disrupting official communications--in terms of odds against the Nazi efficiency and power and violence and vindictiveness would seem to render their witness ridiculous. The risks for them of persecution, arrest, torture, confinement, death were so disproportionate to any concrete results that could practically be expected that most human beings would have despaired--and, one recalls, most did. Yet these persons persevered in their audacious, extemporaneous, fragile, puny, foolish Resistance.

I'm put in mind here of the White Rose and the description of spiritual warfare I gave awhile back in my "On Weakness and Warfare" series. When I speak about "spiritual warfare," about resistance to the principalities and powers, I'm speaking about what Stringfellow is describing here and what the White Rose martyrs exemplified. Spiritual warfare is about learning to live "humanly in the Fall," to use Stringfellow's phrase. Spiritual warfare consists of small, even symbolic, daily acts of resistance and subversion within systems--organizational, political, economic and ideological--to resist the dehumanizing effects of living with and among the principalities and powers.

And yet, these small acts of defiance seem pointless and even hopeless. Nothing will change! Regarding the resistance to the Nazis Stringfellow notes that those involved "were engaged in exceedingly hard and hapless and apparently hopeless tasks." If nothing changes, the question must be asked: "Why would human beings take such risks?" Stringfellow puzzles out an answer to his question:

It is not, I think, because they were heroes or because they besought martyrdom; they were, at the outset, like the Apostles, quite ordinary men and women of various and usual stations and occupations in life. How is their tenacity explained?...Why did these human beings have such uncommon hope?

The answer, according to Stringfellow, is that resistance became the only way to live as a human being:

The answer to such questions is, I believe, that the act of resistance to the power of death incarnate in Nazism was the only means of retaining sanity and conscience. In the circumstances of the Nazi tyranny, resistance became the only human way to live.

To exist, under Nazism, in silence, conformity, fear, acquiescence, obeisance, collaboration--to covet "safety" or "security" on the conditions prescribed by the State--caused moral insanity, meant suicide, was fatally dehumanizing, constituted a form of death. Resistance was the only stance worthy of a human being, as much in responsibility to oneself as to all other humans, as the famous Commandment mentions. And if that posture involved grave and constant peril of persecution, imprisonment, or execution, at least one would have lived humanly while taking these risks. Not to resist, on the other hand, involved the certitude of death--of moral death, of the death of one's humanity, of death to sanity and conscience, of the death which possesses humans profoundly ungrateful for their own lives and for the lives of others.

To draw another parallel here, spiritual warfare, according to the analysis of Václav Havel in his essay "The Power of the Powerless," is "living within the truth" rather than "living within the lie." And the way you do this, according to Havel, is similar to what Stringfellow describes above, small acts of dissent and subversion in the face of the propaganda ("babel" to use Stringfellow's word from Chapter 4) produced by the principalities and powers.

I know many progressive and liberal Christians have not liked my use of the metaphor "spiritual warfare." But my consistent use of this metaphor is pointing to this Stringfellowian and Havelian understanding of spiritual and moral resistance to the dehumanizing forces in the world. Spiritual warfare is learning to live humanly in a dehumanizing and violent world, learning to live within the truth in the face of the lies, propaganda and babel that justify and support the violent and dehumanizing systems of the world.

So that's the first lesson learned from the WW II resistance movement--sanity and conscience is preserved in small, even symbolic, acts of resistance, dissent, noncooperation, and subversion.

For Stringfellow, the second lesson learned from the WW II resistance movement was this:

The other recollection which now visits me from listening to those same Resistance leaders concerns Bible study...

For many within the resistance movement the Bible gave them a story to narrate their experience, a source of prophetic and apocalyptic critique that allowed them to recover their humanity in the face of dehumanizing forces attempting to strip them of dignity:

[In the Resistance] the Bible became alive as a means of nurture and communication; recourse to the Bible was in itself a primary, practical, and essential tactic of resistance. Bible study furnished the precedent for the free, mature, ecumenical, humanizing style of life which became characteristic of those of the confessing movement. This was an exemplary way--a sacrament, really--which expounded the existential scene of the Resistance. That is, it demonstrated the necessities of acting in transcendence of time within time, of living humanly in the midst of death, of seeing and forseeing both the apocalyptic and eschatological in contemporary events. In Bible study within the anti-Nazi Resistance there was an edification of the new or renewed life to which human beings are incessantly called by God--or, if you wish to put differently, by the event of their own humanity in this world--and there was, thus, a witness which is veritably incorporated into the original biblical witness.

A great example of this use of the Bible to support human life in the midst of demonic oppression is Bonhoeffer leading the underground seminary at Finkenwalde. See Bonhoeffer's discussion of Bible study and the use of the psalms in Life Together. See also how Bible study supports those on the margins of society in Bob Ekblad's Reading the Bible with the Damned. Or even my many posts here about my bible study in a prison.

So those are the two techniques Stringfellow describes to support "the Christian resistance to death": 1) small acts of dissent within dehumanizing systems to preserve sanity and conscience and 2) nurturing this resistance by living within the apocalyptic narrative of the Bible.

Link to Chapter 6

Having described the nature of the principalities and powers in Chapter 3 of An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land in Chapter 4 Stringfellow turns to the "Stratagems of the Demonic Powers." In this chapter Stringfellow tries to describe how the principalities and power exert their moral influence upon us.

Stringfellow starts the chapter:

If the powers and principalities be legion, so are the means by which they assault, captivate, enslave, and dominate human beings.

According to Stringfellow, all the "strategies" used by the powers share a common goal, the demoralization of the human conscience:

[E]ach and every stratagem and resort of the principalities seeks the death of the specific faculties of rational and moral comprehension which specifically distinguish human beings from all other creatures. Whatever form or appearance it make take, demonic aggression always aims at the immobilization or surrender or destruction of the mind and at the neutralization or abandonment or demoralization of the conscience.

The goal is to morally incapacitate human beings, to so confuse, distract or overwhelm us that we are made passive, docile, conformist, oblivious and obedient.

Stringfellow goes on to list and describe eight stratagems used by the powers to accomplish this goal.

1. The Denial of Truth
2. Doublespeak and Overtalk
3. Secrecy and Boast of Expertise
4. Surveillance and Harassment
5. Exaggeration and Deception
6. Cursing and Conjuring
7. Usurpation and Absorption
8. Diversion and Demoralization

Almost all of these have to do with an assault on truth. Sometimes this involves simple lying (the denial of truth). Sometimes it means the use of euphemism or jargon (doublespeak). Sometimes it means hiding the truth (secrecy). Sometimes it means diverting and distracting people from the truth (diversion). Sometimes it means banishing, smearing or locking up those speaking the truth (cursing). Sometimes it means diluting the truth with a flood of media, pundit, and talking head coverage (overtalk). Sometimes it means intimidating those seeking the truth (harassment). Sometimes it means co-opting the truth (absorption).

Stringfellow groups these assaults on truth under a collective biblical label: babel. Babel does two things. First, babel overwhelms and dumbfounds the conscience:

Babel means the inversion of language, verbal inflation, libel, rumor, euphemism and coded phrases, rhetorical wantonness, redundancy, hyperbole, such profusion in speech and sound that comprehension is impaired, nonsense, sophistry, jargon, noise, incoherence, a chaos of voices and tongues, falsehood, blasphemy...

Essentially, babel targets the faculties of comprehension--sanity and conscience...

Beyond this verbal battery, Stringfellow also adds to babel the "noise of technology." And this was before the rise of 24-hour cable news, the Internet and social media! The noise of babel has grown exponentially since Stringfellow wrote this.

Second, beyond numbing the conscience babel lays the foundation for violence. Here Stringfellow quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

Let us not forget that violence does not exist by itself and cannot do so; it is necessarily interwoven with lies. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. 

When you look back over the list of stratagems it seems clear that many of these point to the actions of the state. Though, to be clear, all organizations and institutions engage in lies, distraction, euphemism, harassment, surveillance and secrecy.

For example, as discussed in the earlier chapters, the goal of all the principalities and powers is institutional survival. And yet, that brute fact is rarely discussed candidly and in the open. It's hidden under jargon, mission statements, and euphemism. Cutbacks--also known as firing people--are called "budget realignment" or "reinvestment." And in churches you see changes made--in personnel, programs or presentation--to put seats in the pews and money in the collection plate. Though that goal is never overtly named. The changes are called being "missional." Euphemism.

Still, the state functions as the preeminent principality and power. Stringfellow suggests that there is a "hierarchy of principalities" as the powers "are not all equal in life span or capacity for survival or in prominence or influence." According to Stringfellow, the state exists at the top of this hierarchy: "Among all the principalities, in their legion species and diversities, the State has a particular eminence."

And given that the state sits at the top of the hierarchy of demonic powers, the state is generally named as "the Antichrist" in the biblical witness. Consequently, in her battle against the Antichrist the church exists in a state of resistance in relation to the state:

Those human beings and communities of humans who persevere in fidelity to God and to the gift of their humanity, those who resist death and thus live in Jesus Christ--whether that be a public formality or not--do so under the condemnation of the State in one way or another, be it in ridicule and ostracism, in poverty or imprisonment, as sojourners or fugitives, in clandestine existence, as a confessing movement, or, otherwise, in resistance.

Link to Chapter 5

Nearly every blogger I know is burned out right now. Why do you think this is?
— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) January 24, 2014

Rachel sent out this Tweet today. And since I'm not on Twitter or Facebook this is the only location where I can venture a thought.

My two cents, but I think burnout is often the product of expectations. And one of the expectations I think Christians get caught up in is that it's our job to save or change the world.

This problem isn't new to social media. I see it a lot in my college students and in my local church context. You get a passion, say, for the poor and start pouring your life into that issue. But the needs are so overwhelming and your time, energy, influence and bank account way too limited to make a dent.

So you pull away from the big global challenges and focus on local ministries that reach out to the poor. You make new friends. But these new friends start asking you for money. Or they tell you lies to cover for their drug addiction. Or they steal from you. Or they are just too socially damaged to reciprocate the friendship. You give and give and give. And the need out there--even in just one person--seems like a vast hole you're throwing everything into. And getting nothing back. Eventually, you burn out.

A lot of us started out on the Jesus-life as radical young idealists. And then reality hit.

And I wonder--and I am just wondering here--if something similar doesn't happen with social media. We start thinking our blogs or Twitter accounts are "platforms," locations were social media influence can be used to make the world a better place.

So that's what you try to do. And sometimes it seems to work. You write something and the world responds. Your post goes viral and the comments fill up with words of gratitude.

Those are good days. I think I've helped people, in all sorts of ways, with something I've written. Words can give life.

And yet, the opinions and positions out there in the world of social media can be so calcified and dogmatic that conversation feels like banging your head against a wall.

Add to this the fact that social media "debates" tend to be so impersonalized that our worst selves get drawn to the surface. (The lack of face-to-face relationality recently discussed by Jamie the Very Worst Missionary.)

Which all adds up to the feeling that all our social media activity and advocacy isn't changing the world much at all. It feels rather, as I said, like we are banging our heads against the wall.

And sometimes it feels like we are making things worse, that the more we argue on social media the more polarized and entrenched we're becoming.

We are not connecting or changing. We are drifting further and further apart in confusion and anger.

So we get disillusioned with social media, like we do with any sort of ministry that sets out to change the world. We start off as idealists but when the world doesn't change as fast as we'd like it to we end up tired, disillusioned and, well, burnt out.

So, what to do about all this?

I can only speak from my own experience, both as a blogger and as someone who is working hard to make friendships "at the margins" as a part of a local church plant.

I don't know how I can solve the problems of many of my friends. The issues are daunting. Chronic poverty. Drug addiction. Mental illness. Physical disability. Cognitive disability. In the face of all this crushing need for the first time in my life I sort of get what Jesus meant when he said, "The poor you will always have with you."

I can't fix it or make it go away. I can't change the world. I'm not the Messiah. But I can be a sacrament. I can be sign of love, a sign of life. I can be a friend. In a cruel and inhumane world I can be a location of kindness.

I wonder if something similar might be necessary for social media.

I don't think I can change people's minds. I really don't. I don't think people are all that persuadable. So trying to persuade people is sort of like trying to address world poverty with your own checking account. If the poor will always be with us so will dogmatists. Myself included.

So I'm wondering, as I'm learning with issues like poverty, if we might learn to Tweet and blog sacramentally. The goal isn't to argue, debate, call out or "win." Because that game, as best I can tell, isn't winable. Minds don't change on social media. I've never seen it.

The goal is to use social media sacramentally. To be a sign, a sign of life and grace.

Looking back, my blog has been at its best when it has been sacramental. I wrote a post that told a story about love and grace. I shared something that educated, shed some light, inspired thought or reflection.

True, sacramental isn't all that viral. But maybe it could be. Slowly and quietly. A flicker here and a flicker there. Signs and sacraments. Eventually. Everywhere.

Maybe that's the way the world changes.

Here were some search terms that recently brought someone to the blog:

angels ruling over nations

In 2009 I was starting to read more about the theology related to "the principalities and powers." I wrote a few posts named "Notes on Demons and the Powers" to collect some quotes and reflections.  One of those posts was about the angels of the nations.

An interesting way to think about the conflation of the spiritual and the political in the biblical imagination is to trace the development of henotheism (monarchical polytheism) to the angels of the nations to the demonic.

The journey starts in noting that parts of the Old Testament are not strictly monotheistic. In some texts of the OT we see God as presiding over a heavenly assembly of gods. Psalm 82 is a good example:

Psalm 82.1-4
God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:

“How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked

Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.

Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

Notice the conflation of the spiritual and the political/economic. Injustice and economic exploitation is attributed to national deities, the gods of the divine counsel.

We also read in the OT how God assigned these gods to their respective nations:

Deuteronomy 32.8-9
When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance,
when he divided all mankind,
he set up boundaries for the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.

God creates national boundaries and then appoints the "sons of God" over each nation. These "sons of God" are, presumably, those sitting in the divine counsel in Psalm 82.

We start seeing these gods of the nations shift toward the demonic in places like Daniel 10. There we read about how the delay in a divine response to Daniel's prayer was due to angelic interference. The angelic messenger sent to Daniel is opposed by an angel with a regional affiliation, the "prince of Persian kingdom." The messenger was only able to break free after the angel Michael came to his rescue. And here we are very close to the notion many Christians are familiar with, a spiritual conflict between angels and demons.

Big day!

We've arrived at Ground Zero of William Stringfellow studies: Chapter 3 of An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land.

This is the chapter (entitled "The Moral Reality Named Death") where Stringfellow gives what is generally considered to be his fullest and most definitive treatment regarding the nature of "the principalities and powers."

I guess if you were going to read only one chapter of William Stringfellow Chapter 3 of An Ethic might be your best bet.

Before getting to his description of the principalities and powers in Chapter 3 Stringfellow starts by articulating a theology of the Fall. This is important for Stringfellow because our conceptions of the Fall shape our vision of Christian ethics. According to Stringfellow, the Fall isn't just about human sinfulness, people doing bad things. For Stringfellow, the Fall points to the moral disorder of Creation and the resultant antagonism within Creation because of that disorder:

The biblical description of the Fall concerns the alienation of the whole of Creation from God, and, thus, the rupture and profound disorientation of all relationships within the whole of Creation. Human beings are fallen, indeed! But all other creatures suffer fallenness, too. And the other creatures include, as it were, not only cows, but corporations; the other creatures are, among others, the nations, the institutions, the principalities and powers. The biblical doctrine of the Fall means the brokenness of relationships among human beings and the other creatures, and the rest of Creation, and the spoiled and confused identity of each human being, within herself or himself.

The Fall, then, is less about sin than about the moral antagonism we experience in relating to the world, with much of this antagonism coming from "the principalities and powers." Christian ethics, according to Stringfellow, is less about Christian piety than it is about learning to become a human being in the face of the moral antagonism we experience from the principalities and powers, an antagonism that blunts, numbs, confuses, distracts, intimidates and demoralizes the conscience.

From there Stringfellow goes on in the chapter to describe the "Traits of the Principalities." He asks: "Who and what are the principalities and powers? How are the principalities related to the moral reality of death?"

Stringfellow starts by describing the powers as "legion" in appearance and manifestation:

According to the Bible, the principalities are legion in species, number, variety and name...They are designated by such multifarious titles as powers, virtues, thrones, authorities, dominions, demons, princes, strongholds, lords, angels, gods, elements, spirits…

Terms that characterize are frequently used biblically in naming the principalities: “tempter,” “mocker,” “foul spirit,” “destroyer,” “adversary,” “the enemy.” And the privity of the principalities to the power of death incarnate is shown in mention of their agency to Beelzebub or Satan or the Devil or the Antichrist…

And if some of these seem quaint, transposed into contemporary language they lose quaintness and the principalities become recognizable and all too familiar: they include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols. Thus, the Pentagon or the Ford Motor Company or Harvard University or the Hudson Institute or Consolidated Edison or the Diners Club or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are principalities. So are capitalism, Maoism, humanism, Mormonism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, patriotism, plus many, many more—sports, sex, any profession or discipline, technology, money, the family—beyond any prospect of full enumeration. The principalities and powers are legion.

Having described the principalities and powers Stringfellow goes on to comment on two common mistakes we make in relation to them. First, we deny that these institutions and ideologies can have, if we can put it this way, a "will of their own." The powers are not inert. They have goals and, thus, intentions in the world, a "personality" if you will. Stringfellow:

A recurrent stumbling block to comprehending the principalities exists...[because] [h]uman beings are reluctant to acknowledge institutions--or any of the other principalities--as creatures having their own existence, personality, and mode of life.

This leads to the second mistake. In believing that the principalities and powers are passive and inert we trick ourselves into thinking that we can master, control and remake these institutions. We think we are "in change" of the powers when, in fact, quite the opposite is the case: the powers control us:

The typical version of human reluctance to accord the principalities their due integrity as creatures is the illusion of human beings that they make or create and, hence, control institutions and the institutions are no more than groups of human beings duly organized...

[H]uman beings do not control institutions or any other principalities.

Human beings do not control the institutions and ideologies of which they are a part. The institutions and ideologies control and dominate human beings. How so? The principality and power usurps the role of God, inserting and making itself the goal of human existence and the foundation of human worth and significance. Basically, the principalities and powers become idols and we, in serving the powers, engage in idolatry. We come to worship the creature rather than the Creator:

The principality, insinuating itself in the place of God, deceives humans into thinking and acting as if the moral worth and justification of human being is defined and determined by commitment or surrender--literally, sacrifice--of human life to the survival interest, grandeur, and vanity of the principality. 

And as slaves and servants of the powers we become pushed and pulled by their competing demands:

People are veritably besieged, on all sides, at every moment simultaneously by these claims and strivings of the various powers each seeking to dominate, usurp, or take a person’s time, attention, abilities, effort; each grasping at life itself; each demanding idolatrous service and loyalty. In such a tumult it becomes very difficult for a human being even to identify the idols that would possess him or her…

Stringfellow goes on to describe this idolatry as a form of "demonic possession" that dehumanizes human persons:

There are those who actually define their humanity as nonhuman or subhuman loyalty and diligence to the interests and appetites of the principalities. There are many who are dumb and complacent in their captivity by institutions, traditions, and similar powers. There are persons who have become automatons. There are humans who know of no other alternative to an existence in vassalage to the principalities. There are people who are programed and propagandized, conditioned and conformed, intimidated and manipulated, fabricated and consigned to role-playing. These are human beings who are demonically possessed.

Stringfellow, in striking turn of phrase, calls this captivity to the powers "dehumanized obeisance to the demonic."

But what are the powers wanting? What do they need us for? Survival, according to Stringfellow. The animating goal of the powers is to survive:

Corporations and nations and other demonic powers restrict, control, and consume human life or order to sustain and extend and prosper their own survival.
...
The principalities have great resilience; the death game which they play continues, adapting its means of dominating human beings to the sole morality which governs all demonic powers so long as they exist--survival.

And yet, as creatures the principalities and powers are subject to death. Thus, all the idolatrous service rendered to the principalities and powers ultimately becomes, in the long run, service rendered to death. Fighting for survival the ethos of every principality and power is the ethos of death. Death is the "angel"--the morality and spirituality--of every institution and ideology:

[H]istory discloses that the actual meaning of such human idolatry of nations, institutions, or other principalities is death. Death is the only moral significance that a principality proffers human beings. That is to say, whatever intrinsic moral power is embodied in a principality—for a great corporation, profit, for example; or for a nation, hegemony; or for an ideology, conformity—that is sooner or later suspended by the greater moral power of death. Corporations die. Nations die. Ideologies die. Death survives them all. Death is—apart from God—the greatest moral power in this world, outlasting and subduing all other powers no matter how marvelous they may seem for the time being. This means, theologically speaking, that the object of allegiance and servitude, the real idol secreted within all idolatries, the power above all principalities and powers—the idol of all idols—is death.

This is the moral condition of the Fall: human beings idolatrously serving the principalities and powers in the search of meaning and significance only to find that the moral reality behind the powers is death.

Thus, in the final words of Chapter 3, the Fall becomes the place where "human life is sacrificed for the demonic."

Link to Chapter 4

Chapter 2 of William Stringfellow's book An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land is entitled "The Empirical Integrity of the Biblical Witness."

The "empirical integrity of the biblical witness" from the title of Chapter 2 continues to highlight Stringfellow's contention that the focus of the bible is this world at this time. Stringfellow describes this as an "incarnational theology" that produces a "sacramental ethics." In places Stringfellow is very aggressive about the this-worldly focus of the bible:

In [the biblical] story, there is no other place actually known to human beings, except this world as it is--the place where life is at once being lived; there are no other places for which to search or yearn or hope--no utopia, no paradise, no otherworldly afterlife; and no limbo either.

In this history, in this time, Eden and the Fall, Jerusalem and Babylon, Eschaton and Apocalypse converge here and now.

His take home point:

[T]he Bible deals with the sanctification of the actual history of nations and of human beings in his world as it is while that history is being lived.

For Stringfellow, biblical life is life wrestling with history as it happening right here and right now. Any other temporal focus, according to Stringfellow, is un-biblical.

And what we are wrestling with in history, as Stringfellow continues to use the imagery of Revelation, is the antagonism between Babylon and Jerusalem.

Again, according to Stringfellow, Babylon names empirical political realities in history:

Babylon in Revelation is a disclosure and description of an estate or condition which corresponds to the empirical reality of each and every city--of all societies--in history. The Babylon of Revelation is archetypical of all nations...This Babylon is allegorical of the condition of death reigning in each and every nation or similar principality.

In contrast to Babylon is Jerusalem. Stringfellow describes both as "events" rather than as physical locations:

What Babylon means theologically and, hence, existentially for all nations or other principalities in the dimensions of fallenness, doom, and death, Jerusalem means to each nation or power in the terms of holiness, redemption, and life. Babylon describes the apocalyptic while Jerusalem embodies the eschatological as these two realities become recognizable in the present, common history of the world.

This contrast--the experience of Babylon versus Jerusalem in present history--is central to Stringfellow's thinking. At root, Babylon is the location where death currently reigns and Jerusalem is the location where life and resurrection is experienced.

We become enslaved to death, according to Stringfellow, when be buy into the idolatry of Babylon. The great sin of Babylon isn't hedonic excess or lasciviousness. The great sin of Babylon is idolatry, and our use of the principality and power as a means for moral justification and life significance:

The awful ambiguity of Babylon's fallenness is expressed consummately in Babylon's delusion that she is, or is becoming, Jerusalem. This is the same moral confusion which all principalities suffer in one way or another...This is the vanity of every principality--and notably for a nation--that the principality is sovereign in history; which is to say, that it presumes it is the power in relation to which the moral significance of everything and everyone is determined...Babylon's fall is not particularly a punishment for her greed or vice or aggrandizement, despite what some preachers allege. Babylon's futility is her idolatry--her boast of justifying significance or moral ultimacy in her destiny, her reputation, her capabilities, her authority, her glory as a nation. The moral pretenses of Imperial Rome, the millennial claims of Nazism, the arrogance of Marxist dogma, the anxious insistence that America be "number one" among nations are all versions of Babylon's idolatry. All share in this grandiose view of the nation by which the principality assumes the image of God.

The connection of this idolatry with death will be the subject of the next two chapters in the book.

Having described the idolatry of death that characterizes Babylon, Stringfellow goes on to describe Jerusalem as living "within and outside the nations, alongside and over against the nations, coincident with but set apart from the nations." Jerusalem is in the "peculiar posture of simultaneous involvement and disassociation" with the principalities and powers. Jerusalem is an eschatological "pioneer community" existing in the midst of the Fall.

And where is Jerusalem located? Again, for Stringfellow, Jerusalem is more of an event than a location. Consequently, Jerusalem--the experience of a reconciled humanity--is fragile and transitory in nature. Jerusalem exists in time rather than in space:

Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time. Thus the integrity or authenticity of the Jerusalem event in common history is always beheld as if it were a singular or momentary or unique happening. To be more concrete about it, if a congregation somewhere comes to life as Jerusalem at some hour, that carries no necessary implications for either the past or the future of that congregation. The Jerusalem occurrence is sufficient unto itself. There is--then and there--a transfiguration in which the momentary coincides with the eternal, the innocuous becomes momentous and the great is recognized as trivial, the end of history is revealed as the fulfillment of life here and now, and the whole of creation is beheld as sanctified.

So far as the human beings who are participants and witnesses in any manifestation of the Jerusalem reality of the Church are concerned, nothing similar may have happened before and nothing similar may happen again. But that does not detract from the event; it only emphasizes that the crux of the matter is the transcendence of time....

[H]ere and there and now and then--Jerusalem is apparent.

Jerusalem is experienced in those elusive, fleeting but very real moments when we experience the Kingdom of God "on earth as it is in heaven." Think back over your life when you've thought, "Right here and right now, I wish the whole world could be just like this." That's the experience of Jerusalem in the midst of Babylon.

And finally, before leaving this chapter, how are we to characterize the "sacramental ethic" of living in Jerusalem in the midst of Babylon?

Stringfellow says something very interesting about "sacramental ethics" in this chapter. First, because ethical action is always "incarnational," bound to a particular time and place, the "sacramental ethics" of the Christian cannot aspire to eternal and unchanging standards. Ethical action isn't about discerning a timeless "right versus wrong." Consequently, the human assessment of God's judgments concerning "right versus wrong" cannot be the guide for Christian ethical action. Human ethical action--being bound to time and place--will always be provisional and situational. As Stringfellow succinctly puts it, Christian ethical action has to do with "becoming and being human and not with guessing or imitating God's will."

He summarizes:

The ethics of biblical politics offer no basis for divining specific, unambiguous, narrow, or ordained solutions for any social issue. Biblical theology does not deduce "the will of God" for political involvement or social action. The Bible--if it is esteemed for its own genius--does not yield "right" or "good" or "true" or "ultimate" answers. The Bible does not do that in seemingly private or personal matters; even less can it be said to do so in politics or institutional life.
...
Biblical ethics do not pretend the social or political will of God; biblical politics do not implement "right" or "ultimate" answers. In this world, the judgment of God remains God's own secret. No creatures are privy to it, and the task of social ethics is not to second guess the judgment of God.

In fact, Stringfellow goes on to argue that when we do try to "play God" with ethics we end up dehumanizing each other:

It is the inherent and redundant frustration of any pietistic social ethics that the ethical question is presented as a conundrum about the judgment of God in given circumstances. Human beings attempting to cope with that ethical question are certain to become dehumanized.

I think we've all seen this happen. Christians assume that the ethical task is to sort out God's timeless and eternal judgment on any particular issue and then to use that as a weapon to dehumanize others. But as Stringfellow notes, the claim to know God's judgments is inherently idolatrous.

We are human beings. None of us knows what God thinks. Adjudicating right versus wrong in any ultimate sense is idolatrous.

So what is at the heart of a "sacramental ethic"? Stringfellow:

[B]iblically speaking, the singular, straightforward issue of ethics--and the elementary topic of politics--is how to live humanly during the Fall. Any viable human ethic--which is to say, any ethics worthy of human attention and practice, any ethics which manifest and verify hope--is both individual and social. It must deal with human decision and action in relation to the other creatures, notably the principalities and powers in the very midst of the conflict, distortion, alienation, disorientation, chaos, decadence of the Fall.
...
In the Bible, the ethical issue becomes simply: how can a person act humanly now?

That's the question at the heart of the Christian moral vision. How can I act humanly now? How can I act humanly in the midst of the conflict, distortion, alienation, disorientation, chaos, and decadence of the Fall?

This question also guides the community of faith. The experience of Jerusalem is the cultivation, experience and protection of humanity in the midst of the Fall:

[T]he ethical question juxtaposes the witness of the holy nation--Jerusalem--to the other principalities, institutions and the other nations--as to which Babylon is the parable. It asks: how can the Church of Jesus Christ celebrate human life in society now?

Link to Chapter 3

Chapter 1 of William Stringfellow's book An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land is entitled "The Relevance of Babylon."

As with many of Stringfellow's books he selects a book of the bible to be an inspiration and guide. In An Ethic that book is Revelation. And if Revelation is anything it is a prophetic judgment upon Babylon. 

As we read in Revelation Babylon is a demon-infested city, ruled by an ethic of death. Babylon in Revelation is, according to Stringfellow, a moral parable and description of every nation, principality and power. But the focus of An Ethic is "the specific relevance of Babylon for the contemporary American experience." An Ethic reads America as Babylon.

In what way does Babylon describe America?

Stringfellow begins by saying that it's not just that wicked men rule in high places (incidentally Richard Nixon was in office when An Ethic was published). The problem is that America is characterized by a generalized moral incapacity--a hardness of heart, a lack of conscience that is rooted in how our moral lives have been taken captive by organizational and institutional idolatry:

God knows America has wicked men in high places...but that is not the issue immediately raised in emphasizing the nation's moral poverty...

If there be evildoers in the Pentagon or on Wall Street or in prosecutors' offices or among university trustees and administrators or in the CIA or on Madison Avenue or in the FBI or in the ecclesiastical hierarchies or in the cabinet (it would be utterly astonishing if there where not), that is not as morally significant as the occupation of these same and similar premises by men who have become captive and immobilized as human beings by their habitual obeisance to institutions or other principalities as idols. These are persons who have become so entrapped in tradition, or, often, mere routine, who are so fascinated by institutional machinations, who are so much in bondage to the cause of preserving the principality oblivious to the consequences and cost either for other human beings or themselves that they have been thwarted in their moral development.

What Stringfellow describes here is what Hannah Arendt has called "the banality of evil" in her analysis of the mind of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The evil here is the moral apathy and obliviousness--the "thoughtlessness" and "mindlessness" described by Arendt--produced by institutional traditions, policies, procedures, culture, expectations and routines. This is the moral sleepiness induced by "just doing my job." According to Stringfellow, Americans have "become captive and immobilized as human beings" by our  "habitual obeisance to institutions or other principalities as idols."

In the language of Ephesians our battle is not a battle against flesh and blood--against the "wicked men in high places''--but against the moral apathy and oblivion produced by how the America public is enslaved by idolatry to the principalities and powers. As Stringfellow observes, "the American institutional and ideological ethos incubates a profound apathy toward human life." We have become "stupefied as human beings, individually and as a class of persons." We have lost our "moral sanity" which "results in a strange and terrible quitting as human beings."

It should come as no surprise, then, that Stringellow finds moral vitality and freedom among those...

...who are in conflict with the established order--those who are opponents of the status quo, those in rebellion against the system, those who are prisoners, resisters, fugitives, and victims.

Consequently, our movement into freedom and moral vitality involves being set free from idolatrous bondage to the principalities and powers of American life.

Finally, keeping with the theme of a demon-haunted Babylon Stringfellow describes the idolatry of the principalities and powers as a form of demon possession and moral liberation akin to exorcism:

The failure of conscience in American society among its reputed leaders, the deep-seated contempt for human life among the managers of society, the moral deprivation of so-called middle Americans resembles, as has been observed, the estate described biblically as "hardness of the heart." The same condition, afflicting both individuals and institutions (including nations) is otherwise designated in the Bible as a form of demonic possession...

...demonic refers to death comprehended as a moral reality. Hence, for a man to be "possessed of a demon" means concretely that he is a captive of the power of death in one or another of its manifestations which death assumes in history...

...the moral impairment of a person (as where conscience has been retarded or intimidated) is an instance of demonic possession, too. In a somewhat similar way, a nation, or any other principality, may be such a dehumanizing influence with respect to human life in society, may be of such antihuman purpose and policy, may pursue such a course which so demeans human life and so profits death that is must be said, analytically as well as metaphorically, that that nation or other principality is in truth governed by the power of death...

My concern is for the exorcism of that vain spirit.

Link to Chapter 2

We now reach the tenth installment of my William Stringfellow Project where I read all of Stringfellow's books in their first editions and in chronological order.

We've come to the book many consider to be the most significant of Stringfellow's books An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land.

An Ethic was published by Word Books in 1973.

Since An Ethic is considered to be Stringfellow's magnum opus I thought we'd go more slowly through this book, devoting a post to the Preface and each of the six chapters.

Stringfellow begins the Preface and the book with these words:

My concern is to understand America biblically.

What does Stringfellow mean by this? Stringfellow starts on an answer by emphatically stating what he doesn't mean: "[T]o understand America biblically... is not (to put it in an appropriately awkward way) to construe the Bible Americanly."

The goal is to place America under the prophetic judgment of the bible, not to use the bible as an excuse or justification for American exceptionalism. As Stringfellow writes:

To interpret the Bible for the convenience of America, as apropos as that may seem to be to many Americans, represents a radical violence to both the character and content of the biblical message. It fosters a fatal vanity that America is a divinely favored nation and makes of it the credo of a civic religion which is directly threatened by, and, hence, which is anxious and hostile toward the biblical Word. It arrogantly misappropriates political images from the Bible and applies them to America, so that America is conceived of as Zion: as the righteous nation, as a people of superior political morality, as a country and society chosen and especially esteemed by God.

Stringfellow goes on to say that "It is profane, as well as grandiose, to manipulate the Bible in order to apologize for America." We must not "violate the Bible to justify America as a nation."

In short, An Ethic sets out to be a biblical and prophetic critique and indictment of America.

From there Stringfellow goes on to describe the political relevance of the Bible, for America or any other social or political organization. As Stringfellow says: "The biblical topic is politics."

What sort of politics?

The Bible is about the politics of fallen creation and the politics of redemption; the politics of the nations, institutions, ideologies, and causes of this world and the politics of the Kingdom of God; the politics of Babylon and the politics of Jerusalem; the politics of the Antichrist and the politics of Jesus Christ; the politics of the demonic powers and principalities and the politics of the timely judgment of God as sovereign; the politics of death and the politics of life; apocalyptic politics and eschatological politics.

As Stringfellow argues it, salvation is inherently a political issue, "the reality of human life consummated in society within time in this world, here and now, as the promise of renewal and fulfillment vouchsafed for all humans and every nation--for all of Creation--throughout time." Stringfellow's vision of salvation is, thus, very this-worldly. The Kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. This is why the subject of the bible in inherently political.

There is another aspect as to why salvation is inherently political. Specifically, according to Stringfellow our moral fallenness is intimately associated with our captivity and bondage to the principalities and powers.

This is important for Stringfellow as his political orientation might be rejected by pietistic and conservative Christians who think that what is needed to "restore" America to the Christian path is a moral revolution in the lives of individuals. Stringfellow contends that this individualistic and pietistic approach is overly naive about the nature of the Fall and the degree to which inviduals have become enslaved to and bound up with social, cultural, economic and political structures and ideologies--what the bible calls "the principalities and powers." Thus, a moral revolution in the hearts and souls of individuals cannot happen until we attend to our ideological and political captivity and slavery. This wrestling with the principalities and powers is another reason as to why our spiritual struggle in inherently political in nature.

As Stringfellow argues it, "most Americans are grossly naive or remarkably misinformed about the Fall." Thus An Ethic is a book about "the political significance of the Fall," the Fall being this "era in which persons and nations and other creatures exist in profound and poignant and perpetual strife."

Again, political naivete about the Fall is manifested in the belief that the "customary propositions of moral theology concern individual decision and action and suppose efficacy of the conviction of the individual for social renewal and societal change." A focus on individual moral action--Christian piety, being a nice and responsible person--is not enough to address the full scope of the Fall.

To address the full scope of the Fall we need to attend to the principalities and powers and our bondage to them:

What is most crucial about this situation, biblically speaking, is the failure of moral theology, in the American context, to confront the principalities--the institutions, systems, ideologies, and other political and social powers--as militant, aggressive, and immensely influential creatures in the world as it is. Any ethic of social renewal, any effort in social regeneration--regardless of what it concretely projects for human life in society--is certain to be perpetually frustrated unless account is taken of these realities named principalities and their identities and how they operate vis-a-vis one another in relation to human beings.

Stated more strongly:

[A]ny social concern of human beings which neglects or refuses to deal with the principalities with due regard for their own dignity is delusive, while any social change predicated upon mere human action--whether prompted by a so-called social gospel or motivated by some pietism--is doomed.

Thus the focus of the book:

[T]o behold America biblically requires comprehension of the powers and principalities as they appear and as they abound in this world, even, alas in America.

Finally, the goal of this exposition of the powers is to create the capacity for moral freedom in the quest for societal renewal, the search for life in the midst of death. The aim is to find an answer to Stringfellow's central question:

How can we act humanly in the midst of the Fall?

Link to Chapter 1

Just a heads up that starting tomorrow I begin working through William Stringfellow's book An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens Living in a Strange Land. This is the book that many consider to be Stringfellow's best book. I agree.

For this week and next (Monday-Thursday, eight posts in all) I'll be going chapter by chapter through An Ethic. And I'll risk the prediction that in every post there will be something--some quote, idea, insight or turn of phrase--that will blow your hair back.

This heads up is for new or more casual readers of this blog who might not know William Stringfellow and, thus, feel tempted to skip these posts. My encouragement: these next two weeks might be the best thing you read this month. Or year. Or decade.

Can you tell I'm excited?

(Some biographical background for those new to Stringfellow. Stringfellow was an American lawyer and a lay theologian. He was Episcopalian. Most of his books were written in the '60 and '70s, tumultuous years in America. Stringfellow is best known for his seminal analysis of "the principalities and powers.") 

If George MacDonald was the great theological influence upon me during my college years, William Stringfellow is coming to be the theologian of my adulthood.

This week and next I hope you'll come to see why.

Two years ago today our faith community lost Liam Lowe, one of our most courageous and compassionate members, after his 14-month battle with leukemia.

If you read here at the page you might have noticed a link above to Liam's Wells, Liam's ongoing effort to help dig wells in Third World villages who lack clean water sources. It's just one example of how Liam constantly thought of others even in the midst of his own struggles.

Last year when I wrote about Liam many of you generously donated to Liam's Wells.

Liam was incredibly creative and a wonderful artist. After his passing Liam's artwork was displayed in a show at the Abilene Center for Contemporary Arts which was covered in this article in the Abilene Reporter News.

Matt and Amy, Liam's parents, asked me to preside over Liam's graveside service. I felt overwhelmed and overmatched in trying to help in that way. I couldn't think of anything to say. All I could think of was how much love there was in Liam. And how much love there was for Liam in Matt, Amy, and Liam's beautiful sister Mary. And so I read 1 Corinthians 13. An unusual selection for a memorial service, but the passage in the bible that I felt best captured the heart and life of Liam.

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others,
I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I had the gift of prophecy,
and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge,
and if I had such faith that I could move mountains,
but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.
If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body,
I could boast about it;
but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

Love is patient and kind.
Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude.
It does not demand its own way.
It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.
It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices in the truth.
Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful,
and endures through every circumstance.

Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge
will become useless.

But love will last forever.

Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete,
and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture.
But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror,
but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.
All that we know now is partial and incomplete,
but then we will know everything completely, just as God now knows us completely.

Three things will last forever

—faith, hope, and love—

and the greatest of these is love. 

In the prison bible study I was talking about the love of God.

Steve raised his hand.

"How can I believe," he asked, "that God loves me when no one in my life has ever told me that they loved me?"

I listened as Steve went on.

"My father never told me that he loved me. My mother never told that me she loved me. No one has ever told me that they loved me."

I don't think Steve is alone. I think many people struggle to believe that God loves them. The love of God in Christ isn't believable, isn't credible. Usually, like Steve, because we've been emotionally wounded in the past.

Believing that God loves us is very, very hard. I'm reminded of this famous text about the love of God:

Ephesians 3.18-19 (NRSV)
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend. Comprehend what? How deep and wide and high is the love of God for us.

What's interesting here is that the prayer is for the power of comprehension. The power to understand something. The power to know something. The power to know, deep in your bones, just how much God loves you.

That was a power that Steve lacked. Steve couldn't comprehend the love of God.

So what do you do for someone like Steve?

I think you have to live in such a way that makes the love and grace of God credible and believable to others.

Concretely, I begin to tell Steve that I love him. And through my love the love of God becomes credible. We are to become sacraments of God's love, physical signs of God's love, as we stand before others and say "I love you." We mediate the love, grace and mercy of God.

God's love becomes credible, more believable, when we love the world in the name of God.

And so I've started telling Steve that I love him. It's awkward for him, but getting less so. No longer can he say that no one has ever told him that they love him.

And my hope in doing this very simple thing is that in my expressions of love to Steve that he may come to comprehend, that he may come to believe, just how deep and wide and high is the love of God in Christ Jesus.

One of the more interesting contradictions in the Old Testament has to do with the events in 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21.

The story is about a census David makes of Israel. For whatever reason, this census angers YHWH bringing a plague upon Israel. It's not clear why taking a census is so bad. The speculation is that in taking a census David is expressing proprietorship over the people, treating Israel as his property. That's a usurpation of YHWH's position as the true king of Israel.

All that is interesting in its own right, but the real puzzles are what I'm about to point out.

The first puzzle is why David undertakes the census in the first place, given YHWH's disapproval. Here's what we read in 2 Samuel:

2 Samuel 24.1
Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.” 

That's curious, no? The anger of the Lord burned against Israel, so he incited David against them by asking David to undertake a census. You'd think YHWH could just act directly against Israel without any excuse or provocation. But YHWH commands David to take a census which YHWH will find offensive and, thus, unleash the plague on Israel.

All that is very, very weird. But it's not really a contradiction. The contradiction comes when we compare this narrative with a retelling of the same story--David taking the census and the subsequent plague--in 1 Chronicles:

1 Chronicles 21.1
Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel. 

See the problem? In 2 Samuel "the Lord" incites David to take the census. In 1 Chronicles it's "Satan."

What's going on? Two things might be going on. First, we know that 1 Chronicles is the later document. So, first hypothesis, is that the author of 1 Chronicles is trying to clean up the weirdness of the earlier story. Why would God incite David to do something God would find offensive? By plugging in Satan some of that weirdness goes away.

A second hypothesis is that the author of 1 Chronicles is writing a historical apology for the Davidic dynasty. Consequently, the bias of the author of 1 Chronicles is to portray David in the best light possible. For example, David's sin with Bathsheba isn't recounted in 1 Chronicles. So the theory is that the introduction of Satan in 1 Chronicles 21 is a way to lessen David's culpability in the episode. The devil made him do it.

Then why not eliminate the story like what was done with Bathsheba? Because the story of the census explains why the temple was built at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. (David turns back the destroying angel by offering a sacrifice at the threshing floor of Araunah.) Beyond defending the Davidic dynasty the author of 1 Chronicles is also keen to defend Jerusalem and the temple cult as the cornerstone of Israel's religious identity. Consequently, the story about the origins of the temple has to be included.

So those are two ideas about why "the Lord" in 2 Samuel 24 becomes "Satan" in 1 Chronicles 21.

Regardless, I bring up the issue simply to say that if you believe in "biblical inerrancy" you're going to have to struggle with 2 Samuel 24.1 and 1 Chronicles 21.1.

In yesterday's post I discussed the translation of hebel in the book of Ecclesiastes. Where most English translations translate hebel as "vanity" or "meaninglessness" hebel's literal meaning is vapor, breath or mist. Life, according to Ecclesiastes, isn't vain or meaningless, life is fleeting.

Consider other texts where this meaning of hebel is very clear:

Psalm 39.5
You have made my days a mere handbreadth;
the span of my years is as nothing before you.
Everyone is but a breath [hebel],
even those who seem secure.

Psalm 114.3-4
Lord, what are human beings that you care for them,
mere mortals that you think of them?
They are like a breath [hebel];
their days are like a fleeting shadow.

And while Psalm 90 doesn't mention hebel, it is very much a description of hebel and suggests that a proper understanding of hebel creates a "heart of wisdom":

Psalm 90.3-6, 10, 12
You turn people back to dust,
saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”
A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.

Our days may come to seventy years,
or eighty, if our strength endures;
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

Teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Life is hebel, our years "quickly pass, and then we fly away." So the encouragement in Psalm 90 is, I think, the same encouragement in Ecclesiastes: "Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

Number your days. Because life is hebel each day is precious, a sparkling jewel. Hallowing the moment creates a heart of wisdom.

So what about the great theme of vanity in the book of Ecclesiastes?

Like I mentioned in yesterday's post, translating hebel as "vanity" is a second-order value judgment that reflects how hebel, given its transient nature, can create futility in human striving. But this is less a commentary about the intrinsic nature of hebel than how we attempt to grasp at hebel, the "chasing after the wind" mentioned repeatedly in Ecclesiastes. What is vain is this grasping and chasing after hebel. It's the interaction of the two--hebel plus chasing--that creates the futility.

So what are we chasing? What are we grasping at?

A clue comes right at the start of the book, in 1.3:

What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?

The word translated as "gain" here is yithron. Yithron only occurs ten times in the OT, all of those occurrences in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Yithron is variously translated as gain, profit or advantage. The basic idea is that of accumulation, excess, and remainder--what is "left over." Basically, to use a financial metaphor, yithron is getting life "into the black" as it were.

Obviously, because life is hebel efforts to "gain" are futile and vain. Thus the examples given in the first part of Ecclesiastes about how all sorts of efforts at gaining or acquiring--creating an "excess"--are futile. Death washes any sort of "profit"--the excess remainder of your life--away.

This acquisitive grasping--this chasing after the wind--is what is vain. It's the combination of hebel and yithron that makes for the vanity. Crudely:

hebel + yithron = vanity

wind + chasing = vanity

This is why, I think, hebel is also associated with idolatry in the OT.

According to the prophets, idols are vain, they are hebel. In two different ways. First, idols are hebel ontologically--they are mist. But more to the point, the motivation behind the creation of the idol is what is vain. An idol is an attempt to create--of your own effort and out of sand--something lasting and substantial. What is vain about idolatry is the human presumption, to think that your sandcastle made of hebel is permanent, transcendent and eternal. The vanity of idols is less the fact that they are sandcastles--human products--than the idolatrous worship of sandcastles.

In this sense, then, Ecclesiastes is very much about idolatry, about our attempts to secure meaning and significance through human achievement or entertainments. The idolatrous thirst for yithron--for profit, advantage or gain--is revealed to be vanity. Because life is hebel. We are hebel. Anything we construct and worship is just going to wash away. Our idols will not last.

This is, I think, the genius of Ecclesiastes: Death is used as a universal acid for idolatry.

Hey, for a critique of idolatry I love the prophets. But few of us have a shrine to Baal in the house or an Asherah pole in the backyard. So if you want to expose and indict the vanity and vacuousness of modern American idolatry there is no better book than Ecclesiastes.

The dollars in your bank account. Hebel. The degrees hanging on my wall. Hebel. Your big house. Hebel. That new iPhone. Hebel. Your buff body. Hebel. The American flag. Hebel.

We are chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing the wind.

In fact, if you'll allow me this liberty, I think for Americans it's more like pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing the wind.

Wisdom, then, is to stop chasing and pushing. To stop seeking advantage, gain and profit. To stop creating idols out of the sand. Wisdom is settling into the preciousness of the day. "Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

Wisdom is learning to rest.

No more anxious chasing of yithron.

Thus the constant refrain of Ecclesiastes. Enjoy the day. Enjoy your loved ones. Enjoy the simple pleasures of food and drink, the fruits of your day's labor.

Rest.

You know what that sounds like to me? It sounds like Sabbath.

So a link is formed, I think, in Ecclesiastes between the celebration of Sabbath and how we resist idolatry. In Sabbath resting we stop chasing the wind. We settle into the sacredness of the day and realize that all our strivings have this potential to be vanity, to become idolatry.

Resting--numbering the day, numbering this day--helps us fight against the idolatrous pursuit of yithron.

For there is no profit or gain or advantage in Sabbath. The Sabbath is empty, non-productive activity. The Sabbath is simply resting.

And it is the heart of wisdom.