When We Hate Those Who Have a Name

When people oppose us, take views that are not only different from ours but offensive to our religious/political/social sensibilities, there are so many incredible things we can say about them:

Homophobes! Haters!

Liberals! Heretics!

Conservatives! Close-minded bigots!

Evolutionists! Despisers of God!

Creationists! Head-in-the-sand morons!

Catholics! Pope lovers!

Reformers! Protest lovers!

And on and on and on. Incredible, in the strictest sense of the word: So implausible as to elicit unbelief (Free Online Dictionary). But we must believe it because it is happening all around us.

But once, in a moment of weakness, we might stop talking, stop crafting our objections in our heads, stop doing our defensive self-talk that says we have to argue down all comers, and

we listen.

we listen.

We hear how fear and pain have formed the views of the other. We hear how the other has thought about the issue that divides us and learn that the one sitting before us may not be a fool or a heretic, but instead, has approached a difficult topic from a perspective that we hadn’t considered.

And sometimes—just sometimes—we learn that we sit across from a co-human who struggles with life like we do. We sometimes discover that our so-called opponent also claims to share with us a common faith

(can it be so? Can you belong to Jesus and be a . . . . and believe that . . . . and be aligned there . . . . and here . . . . and be that kind of person . . . .

and, and, and.

And sometimes, we learn that the one we have categorized, vilified, demonized, and ostracized

has a name. A name that we can speak as though speaking with a human

a co-human, one made in the image of God.

And our ears ring with familiarity, and revelation, and illumination. And sometimes we get up from the table still marked by disagreement but possibly also marked

by friendship.

And we turn and see Jesus, the Friend of Sinners. Our Friend.

And together we come to his table to share bread and wine, body and blood, and we come not out of worthiness but because we have been invited by Jesus himself

who hears us argue, hears us malign, hears us condemn, hears us reduce and categorize. And he listens to us.

And he loves us.

And he weeps.

Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on us.

Putting a Face on Our Enemies

I think that one of the reasons that the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is so attractive to people is that he has become accessible to us as a real person. His Letters and Papers from Prison offer a glimpse into the inner life of the brilliant theologian, putting a real face on an incredible mind. His biographers show us that his written work was not mere theological abstraction—it was increasingly formed in the crucible of the horrors of Nazi Germany and World War Two.

The work of the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann attracts me in a similar way. In the introduction to his fine book, The Spirit of Life, he recounts his formative time as a prisoner of war in Scottish and British camps at the end and after World War Two. He came to faith in Christ during that time, and his story is one that I can barely read without tears. Knowing a little about how his life was formed, I am helped in the reading of his work.

We need to put faces, not only on our heroes, but also on our enemies. There is a great deal of caricature in public debate—after all, you know how those atheists are, you know how those fundamentalist Christians are, you know how those Emergent-types are, you know how gay people are, you know how liberals are, etc., etc.

Mostly, we don’t know.

I had lunch one day with a young man who was the president of an atheist club at the local university. He thought I wanted to meet with him in order to fight. I just wanted to hear what his atheism meant to him. We heard each other on that day, and became friends. We knew each other’s names.

I know a man who was treated with a rudeness bordering on violence by a man he visited on a business call. It was enemy time, and should have resulted in a quick getaway. But the man I know stuck around and persisted in conversation. It turned out that the man who acted rudely had just lost his eighteen-year old son in a traffic accident just a couple of days earlier. The environment changed, and enemies had faces and lives.

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is quoted as saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven . . .” (Matt. 5:43-45)

Loving one’s enemy cannot be limited to some sort of warm and fuzzy feeling toward those who stand in opposition to us. It has to be real. Part of that reality, I believe, is putting a face on our enemies, allowing ourselves to enter their space and hear their story, not listening in order to rebut, but in order to understand. Then we might earn the opportunity to tell our own stories and to be understood. Love could actually emerge between enemies when that happens.

Heretics as Conservative and Liberal

Yesterday I was sitting in a workshop dealing with educational diversity, and this quote stuck with me:

“If the goal of liberal education is to move students from their own embedded worldviews and broaden their perspectives—diversity is a vehicle for achieving this goal.”

Liberal here, of course, is not a theological or political label, but a term reference to a broad type of educational experience that exposes the student to a wide range of thought and scholarship.

But the quote caused me to think of a billboard I saw recently from a local Christian university:

“Think Biblically About Everything.”

I think I understand the intention behind this statement. Christians are people of the Bible, and our texts help to form our thinking about ourselves, our faith, and the world.

But what if our way of thinking biblically comes out of an embedded worldview that has any number of misconceptions about the world? What if “thinking biblically” really means, as I think it does, thinking with our embedded way of interpreting the Bible?

For example: Quite of few people in the southern part of the US in the 18th and 19th century believed that slavery was a practice that was biblical. After all, there is no specific prohibition against slavery in scripture. In a sense, the abolitionists—many of whom were committed Christians—were seen as running cross-grain against the Bible. They could be seen as religious, economic, and political heretics.

When I believe I have my answers all nailed down, I can easily and effectively identify the heretics: They are the ones who think differently from me.

That doesn’t mean that people who think differently from me (or you) aren’t heretics. They might be. But their challenge to my way of thinking is not tantamount to heresy. Otherwise, we would have to say that the canon is closed on debate and on thinking in general. Without that dynamic, there would not have been a Protestant Reformation (or, for that matter, a Catholic Reformation).

Are we done thinking, challenging, and reforming? A common Reformation declaration is “Reformed, and always reforming.” Are we really always reforming? Or do we have everything figured out?

Two labels that have become increasing unhelpful are conservative and liberal. They currently seem to identify two large camps that hate each other. I wish we could reform those terms and the thinking that goes with them, maybe this way:

Being conservative is great when there is something of deep and lasting value that needs to be conserved.

Being liberal is great when old and new ideas are both allowed at the discussion table, and cognitive dissonance is resolved through listening and dialogue.

Conservatives tend to see liberals, by default, as heretics.

Liberals tend to see conservatives, by default, as idiots.

We need to work on this.

What is "Progressive"?

When we speak of being (or others being) progressive, what do we mean?

Historically, at least in the US, progressivism was associated with social reform that addressed working conditions, child labor, fair housing, and so on. Presently, however, the terms “progressive” and “liberal” appear to have become conflated.

Progressivism today seems to have more to do with the demand for individual rights than it does with social reform (although some might point out that the various legislations that emerge from those demands create reform). As new interest groups rise up to demand rights, their causes are typically championed by those who identify themselves as progressive.

There are also followers of Jesus who consider themselves to be progressive. From my experience, they seem to line up with those who live in the progressive political world.

As I consider this, I have to ask a question: What is the force that causes the progression in the first place? In other words, from what, to what, and by what do we progress? Is it some sort of evolutionary power that pushes us along? Is it popular consensus? Is it the mounting demands of various interest groups? What is it that moves us along?

There’s a great story in the New Testament (Acts 10-11) about something progressive taking place. The emerging followers of Jesus were seeing their experience as a uniquely Jewish story (can’t blame them, really). When Peter ended up meeting with a group on non-Jewish, God-fearing gentiles, the Spirit of God fell upon them. Peter realized that something he never anticipated was happening, and he reported it to his co-leaders in the Jerusalem church. They agreed (at least initially) that the Jesus experience was a much bigger story than they had ever imagined.

I think those folks would have claimed a progressivism that was caused by the movement of the Holy Spirit. But it wasn’t simply grounded in cultural or social preference. They (Paul, actually) would go back to their own Scriptures and discover that the grand preferences of God for the world were there all the time, but they had missed them. In that sense, they were actually becoming conservative, as they sought to conserve what they now believed was God’s true desires for all people.

We need to think about this whole idea of being progressive. I think we ought to pause for moment and think about the power that pushes us to progress through history.

New Requirements and New Enemies

As the GOP continues its journey toward a presidential nominee, I've observed some new requirements for a candidate's acceptability and some enemies that we apparently need to fear.

Here are the new requirements:

A candidate must be able to

1. Prove to be the most conservative of all.

The Republican candidates have dueled over this requirement, as if the most desirable brand of conservatism is the one that is furthest away from the center. There are certainly important things to conserve, and I would think that an open table of debate would be one of them. I'm unclear about how fighting over who's the most conservative accomplishes that.

2. Endorse a faith system that is the most acceptable to the evangelical voting block.

Rick Santorum seems to be doing well in this one. It's interesting to me that when John F. Kennedy was running for office, people feared that a Roman Catholic would allow the US to be run by the Vatican. Now the fear seems to be transferred to the Temple in Salt Lake City. What would we have done if Joe Lieberman had become President? Would it have been Tel Aviv or Yahweh in charge? Would Joe's faith have been enough for evangelicals?

Here are the new enemies:

1. Moderates.

From what I've been hearing, the Liberals are not the only enemy to fear. Now the Moderates are under suspicion. Is it now undesirable to have someone in office who serves the entire country? Standing firmly in one extreme or the other is better, right? Bad, bad Moderates.

2. Candidates who can't make us evangelicals happy.

Disturbingly, we evangelicals (whoever we really are) come off as a grumpy bunch. The Bible says a lot about joy (the kind that is grounded in Jesus, not the kind that is the result of getting what we want), and it appears that our joy is complete when we get the right candidate in office. So we seem to demand a candidate that bellies up to the bar and meets our demands (and, as one Christian leader has suggested, to awaken "the sleeping giant" of Christianity).

I get worried about this sort of thing. I would hope that USAmerican Christians (and it's a pretty diverse bunch, hardly unified sufficiently to be a sleeping giant) would continue to press upon issues that need to be addressed in our country—like poverty, injustice, immigration—without characterizing ourselves as a powerful political force that can make or break elections.

Isn't our vocation as followers of Jesus different from that? Or is the term "evangelical" now indistinguishable from "conservative Republican?"

I'm not suggested that "liberal Democrat" or "moderate whatevers" would be better. I'm suggesting that we American Christians—particularly the most vocal evangelicals—slow down and revisit the true vocation of followers of Jesus. That's a label that should stand on its own.