FOCaL – Introduction and upcoming conference
Posted by stimulusjournal on June 4, 2006
Just before the election in 2005 a new group entered the Christian scene: namely, “FOCaL” – Forum of the Christian Left. It grew out of four of us meeting for a quiet beer in Saint Lee’s, an old Methodist church in Dunedin which had been converted into a cafe.
The 2005 election saw unprecedented levels of Christian involvement and public discourse recorded in the media. On the one hand that was a good thing; Christians getting involved in society and making a stand for their beliefs and calling the nation to recognise that actions do have consequences. But, it also made the four of us slightly uncomfortable. The Christian voice that was heard seemed to all be from the right – be it the Closed Brethren, Destiny, Maxim, Christian Heritage, or individual pastors making passionate statements about New Zealand’s moral decline (United Future is more centrist but came across as less overtly “Christian” last election). For outsiders to the faith, being politically right-wing seemed to be the default and expected position of Christians.
Likewise, for the four of us as church-attending Christians, being right-wing seemed to be the position that was expected of us by most of our brothers and sisters in the Lord. We heard numerous stories of vicars, ministers, and pastors preaching in their sermons that Labour and the Greens were evil, and that Christians should not vote for them; the leader of the Baptist movement publicly declared that Baptists should try to vote out Labour; a principal of a respected Bible college sent out a letter that didn’t name parties, but which was quite clearly cautioning against voting Labour; and a church with which I was associated printed a graph in their monthly magazine charting how each party had voted in relation to “traditional Christian morality.”
For me personally that graph was highly offensive and very disturbing. In keeping with the dominant rhetoric coming out of Christian circles at the time, United, National, and Act were ranked most godly in their voting patterns, while Labour and the Greens were shown to consistently oppose Christian ethics.Why FOCaL?
Why did I in particular get so excited that night in the café, when someone mooted the idea of starting FOCal? There are several reasons which I will outline below.
As an evangelical Christian holding some socialist values I had always known that some of my Christian friends voted left while others voted right, and this had not been a source of tension. In the lead-up to the 2005 election, however, with the constant media portrayal of the “Christian position” as well as the statements (such as that graph) coming out of individual churches and national church leaders, I began to feel very much a minority. I also began to feel judged by my evangelical peers for supporting the “forces of darkness” by desiring to vote left.
I was feeling disturbed by the ethical reductionism I saw in the anti-left rhetoric coming out of the evangelical churches. Basically it seemed to be about sex, prostitution law reform, and civil unions coming across as the main issues. Naturally there were other issues as well, but they also centred on the realm of personal morality.
I can fully understand why such issues would disturb Christians and how that would put them off voting for the left, but there were so many other issues at stake as well. Reading the Bible I see that sex is not the only topic addressed; in fact it isn’t even one of the main issues in scripture. Biblical morality covers all of life and there were many issues of Christian morality at stake in this election. Some examples were stewardship of God’s good creation; taking a stand against racism; love of neighbour; caring for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the refugee in the land; historic justice and the Treaty.
Again, I can fully understand how Christians could weigh up all the above issues and come to the decision that a vote for the right was the lesser of two evils, but there seemed to be very little discussion about issues broader than sex. There seemed to be a lot of rhetoric and reaction, but little reason and reflection. Naturally, if only one perspective is dominant, many Christians will uncritically conform to it, believing it to be “the” Christian position. With an absence of other voices, many Christians I encountered last year seemed to do just that.
Let us not repeat the mistakes of the past! The colonial church in NZ (with notable exceptions) did little to challenge the injustices being done during the European settlement of our land, instead focusing on issues of personal morality. Last election the church in NZ (again with notable exceptions) largely failed to address the consequences of those earlier injustices, instead focusing on issues of personal morality. In 2005 many New Zealanders (especially Maori) came to feel that some right-wing parties were explicitly using racism as a tool to win votes among conservative Pakeha. The churches’ uncritical support of those very parties and silence on that issue as presented in the media, suggested that as a whole Christians did not disapprove of that behaviour. FOCaL aimsFOCaL was not started with the idea that a left-wing interpretation of our faith is the only valid interpretation, or with a desire to convert everyone to our perspective. Rather:
1. FOCaL was envisioned to be a gathering point for Christians with left-wing views. A place for them to be affirmed and supported, and a safe place to discuss issues and seek to apply our faith to society today. To begin that we started a website – www.focal.org.nz.
2. FOCaL was also intended to be a group that encouraged discussion among Christians in NZ, not one that shut discussion down. We perceived that there was too much sloganeering and reaction, and too little reflection and constructive dialogue in the church during the 2005 election, and we desired for that not to happen again. We hoped that over time FOCaL might become a “focal-point” for Christians with expertise in areas such as economics, race-relations, the environment, etc. When the media desired a perspective that differed from the more vocal right-wing stance, they could come to us and we could give them names of experts whom they could approach.
With that in mind – the desire to create dialogue and not shut it down – there was significant discussion early on about the use of the word “left” in the name. Some felt uncomfortable that this might be too exclusive. In the end however, we decided that if it is to be a safe place to discuss issues, it is better to have people involved who hold the dominant rhetoric lightly. Also, there are right-wing Christian groups in NZ who do not openly identify their political bias. Thus, when they speak it has the force of saying “This is Christian truth! To disagree with us is to disagree with Christian orthodoxy.” We did not wish to convey that, so by using the word “left” we hope that we are saying “This is a left-wing perspective on Christian truth. You’re free to disagree with us but let’s discuss why.”
Similarly, we are consciously using the word “Christian” in our name. We are Christians and most of us have come to hold left-wing political views as a result of thinking about our faith and seeking to be followers of Christ in our modern world. Although we do not hold THE definitive Christian position, we are members of the body of Christ and we wish to be held accountable to that fact. If people don’t agree with us that’s fine, but why? Let’s have a discussion about it! We want to inspire Christians in NZ to read their Bibles and do theology. Not explicitly defining ourselves as Christian would make it very hard to hold what we say accountable to the Word of God and the history of Christian thought.First FOCaL conference – June 30th to July 1st Wellington Central Baptist Church
Out of a desire to further these aims, as well as wanting to foster better church-politician relationships, we have organised our first conference – “Church and Society post-election 05” – to be held Friday June 30th and Saturday July 1st in Wellington Central Baptist Church. We feel that the time is right to pause and reflect on last year.
In order for it to be less partisan and reflect a wider sector of the church in NZ, we have invited the Victoria University Religious Studies Department to co-sponsor this event. We have also invited a broad cross-section of political parties to be involved; so far Labour, National, the Greens, United Future, and the Progressives have agreed to send representatives. There should be a good number of politicians present.
This conference will involve the presenting of papers by respected and well-known Christian thinkers, followed by responses from politicians, academics and social workers. There will also be workshops and times for open discussion. Feel free to come along, listen and discuss!For more details check out http://www.focal.org.nz/conference.htm.
Rev Nathan Parry is the coordinator of the FOCaL conference occurring in June. He is the minister at Island Bay Presbyterian Church in Wellington.
Gavin Drew said
I’m cancelling my subscription.
We’ve been discussing whether not “the Christian left” is an oxymoron or a tautology.
It’s interesting to note that Christians on either side of the political fence are frequently heard to moan about the other side as having captured both the mechanisms of influence within the church and the perceptions – about the church’s political inclinations – of those who do not participate in church.
For a long time I’ve been happy to go into bat for the view that authentic Christianity lines up better with leftist concerns, rather than the rightist agenda. Therefore, I guess its not surprising that I am one who has bemoaned the way the church seems to be populated by people sympathetic to the right – at least this seems to be the case in “middle-class” [sic] evangelicalism. Similarly, I’ve been dismayed that rightwing fundamentalism is seen, by people in general, to be the political face of Christian faith. The Forum of the Christian Left (FOCaL) has been formed precisely out such dismay.
But in discussing whether or not “the Christian left” is an oxymoron, with my rightwing Christian friends, I’ve noted its like talking to a mirror. (Yes, like the white middle class liberal who has been quoted as saying, “Some of my best friends are black”, I have friends of a different political colour to my own shade of red.) Right wingers often similarly grumble about the church being populated by people sympathetic to the left and about the way people in general see the church as the last bastion of outmoded reactionary leftism – the fossilised relics of a dinosaur – when even the Labour Party has seen the light from the right. Funny stuff perceptions, eh?!
But, increasingly I’m uncomfortable with the labels “left” and “right”. I guess I’m in the process of cancelling my subscription to them. Sure, last Sunday I gave a sermon, about the “wisdom” of Solomon, drawing upon the Marxist critique of religion. I even mentioned Marx by name. I still think there is much in the Marxist socio-political critique that has abiding heuristic significance and is instructive. But, in the end, be it left or right, human politics is human politics. At the core it will never, of itself, line up adequately with the values and dynamics of the coming kingdom of God.
Sure, in principle, the humanism at the core of socialism looks quite a bit like the values of the kingdom of God, inasmuch as the socialist intention is to construct society so as to facilitate the growth, fulfilment and appropriate happiness of all people. But the humanism at the core of socialism is invariably self-referring and, as such, it is inadequate. Socialism, being an essentially human take on the values and intentional organisation of human community, has no reference beyond itself. Socialism isn’t predicated upon our being made in God’s image.
Okay, socialism emphasises that human beings are fundamentally social creatures and are best understood in terms of social considerations. That seems to line up with biblical communitarianism. Or put the other way around, since there is a clear case for understanding Genesis 1:26 and 27 as referring to our inextricably communitarian existence, the Judeo-Christian contention, that we are what we are by being made in the image of God, seems to line up here with socialism’s theoretically communitarian emphasis.
The image of God is a plural, interconnected collective thing; a state and status into which we grow together, because of Jesus Christ. However, the Judeo-Christian understanding that we are being made in the image of God is not merely social and communitarian; it is those things because it is fundamentally an interpersonal matter. Community arises as a consequence of our personhood’s intrinsic and inextricably relational actuality. Logically, it is from our human personhood that community arises; not the other way around.
But, society is an objectification of community. That objectification is a crucial step in the intentional construction of society. However, in objectifying community, the personalist core is removed and replaced with the abstract notion of formalised social relations. Further, the idea of society is elevated to the causitive role; society is held to be logically causitive of what and who we are. The consequence is that the fundamentally personal dimension no longer figures and ultimately may be denied. The initial step along the socialist path to dehumanising totalitarianism is the objectification of community and the accompanying in hubris, that we are, of ourselves, up to the work of intentionally constructing society.
Without transcendental reference to our being made in God’s image socialism, as an essentially human take on the construction of society, remains locked within its narcissistic imaginings of its own secularised blessed state to come. As a self-reflexive human view of the human social condition, socialism has no desire to look beyond itself for a coming state of blessing “from above”. Consequently, the how of social blessedness from below can only be a programme of human artifice. Since we are our own and only hope of salvation, from the treat to ourselves from of ourselves, the construction of society demands maximum control of human beings by human beings. We may not fail, for we have no hope beyond ourselves. Therefore, nothing may be left to chance or remain open to mere possibility of providence. Hence, what begins as a programme for human liberation, inevitably becomes a matter of totalising human control. The nanny state, is the logical consequence of the hubris that thinks human beings are in, and up to, ultimate control and that all that is required to achieve heaven on earth is to apply more, and more control constructively for the common good.
Right wingers can point to instance after instance where socialism – often viewed as the natural outworking of dialectics of matter – has produced, and must produce, totalitarianism. There is no room, nor can there be, in Big Brother’s totalising world, for human persons being made in God’s image. Socialist theory presents socialism as humanising but, in practice, it becomes dehumanising. It cannot fail to be ultimately dehumanising, since it seeks to outwork a theory of humanity in which the ground of our personhood, the gound of our humanity, is excluded. Socialism limits the deck so that only certain cards can be played.
But, all this should not be taken to indicate that I’ve become a capitalist. Sure capitalism doesn’t give a rat’s … about whether human beings are persons or not. Under – and “under” is the right word – capitalism, human beings, individual human beings, can think what they like about themselves and Christians can get together and talk to themselves ‘til the cows come home about God and about being made in God’s image. Capitalism creates private space for such irrelevant talk, so long as it is kept out of the public arena and doesn’t threaten the maximisation of business freedom.
While socialism raises an abstract construct, society, over concrete community and interpersonal reality, capitalism raises an abstract construct, the market, over the same reality. The result is pretty much congruent. This time the notion of the market is constructed from the objectification of community. Again the personalist core of our social existence is removed and replaced with an abstract notion, albeit that this time the controlling notion is that of formalised economic relations within the sovereignly free dynamics of supply and demand. We are no more persons under capitalism than we are under socialism. Under capitalism we are individuals (“persons” are irrelevant to the market), economic units that participate in, and have value only in relation to, the market.
The rightist may say that where as the nanny state or Big brother of socialism has no room for the idea of private space, capitalism at least recognises a private realm in which people are free to talk about and think of themselves as persons. But we need to pause and ask if that private space is anything more than a la-la-land for the impotent who can’t hack it and fail to carve out a place of identity for themselves by acting entrepreneurally within realities of the market. Such private space – as distinct from the public space defined, controlled and sustained by the “free” market – is a ghetto for the things that have no place in the public sphere.
Indeed, socialist and capitalist agree that human reality is economic reality and that which falls outside that space is automatically consigned to the outer darkness of irrelevance. Socialist and capitalist also agree that to let talk of human personhood come in from the dark and take up real place in public discourse would be to put a major spanner in the works of each ideology’s materialist programme.
Whether it is the Hobbsian/Thatcherite slogan, “There is no such thing as society”, or the socialist belief that human beings of themselves can construct a just society, both ideologies are hermetically sealed, self-referring and deny a real open space for persons. Both are ultimately totalitarian and both are ultimately dehumanising. If “the Christian left” is an oxymoron, then so too is “the Christian right”.
It seems obvious that totalitarianism is always the enemy of a free society. But, must that be so? Karl Popper might wish that he hadn’t done such an effective job on criticising logical positivism, for at least positivism proved to be socially effective in restricting Christian faith to the privatised ghetto of irrelevance. Post Popper it is no longer possible to confidently relegate faith assertions to the la-la-land of meaningless private delusion. Further, for all its proper emphasis upon hubris as a major component in sin, and its emphasis upon self-giving servanthood as a major component with in the space-creating self-sacrifice of Christian action in the would, Christian faith is supremely totalising. Christian fait is the ultimate meta-story. The paradox is that because this totalising is located in God, not in human social relations, or in the all-powerful market, human persons are liberated, by the trajectory of the story of the gospel, to be persons, to be creatures being made in the image of the self-giving god.
Yahweh is the sole creator and sustainer of heaven and earth. The covenant Yahweh made with (his) people is structured precisely to bring about human liberation and human good. The formative story of Israel is the exodus, whereby the covenant with Israel – re-establishing with Israel the mandate and mission that God gave to Adam and Eve – is established and defined in terms of liberation. Further, the social interactions prescribed by the covenant are such that they require the recognition of persons, their value and their needs. The unpacking of God’s covenant makes much of the dynamic that all creation belongs to the creator, that all creation is God’s to do with what God wills – yet the land, the means of production, is gifted by God, in a leasehold structure, to God’s people, for their use and husbandry, for a season. Biblically it is held that this covennantal providence will continue to be sustained by God upon the condition that the results are just and that no one within the commonwealth of Israel should be found to be needy or dehumanised (see for example Leviticus 25).
God’s sovereignty is totalising. But unlike in human totalitarian narratives this is a supreme good. It will be remembered that in 1 Samuel 8, we can read that when the Israelites came to Samuel and told him to ask God to appoint a king for them. God told Samuel to warn the people that if they were to have a king, he would turn out to be an oppressor, because that’s what human kings do, that’s what they are. Saul proved to be less that satisfactory. David, who, although he was yet another fresh start, evidenced that, at a personal level, he too was not up to acting with thoroughly covenantal integrity. Then Solomon explicitly proved Yahweh correct, as did most of the subsequent kings of Israel and Judah. They neglected the covenant and oppressed the needy. In discussing kingship with Samuel, Yahweh made the point that he alone is king and that the people’s desire for a human king was a rejection of him and a rejection of the character of his covenant agreement with them. God’s covenant agreement required that the Israelites live together in freedom and justice not slavery.
Properly there was to be no melek (king), no Pharaoh, no Caesar, over the people of God because Yahweh, the maker and sustainer of heaven and earth alone is sovereign. Not only does the sovereign god will social justice, personal righteousness and communitarian peace; the result of all being ultimately subject to the singularly sovereign god, is that no one can legitimately grasp for the ring of power for themselves. By holding all power, by owning all creation, by sustaining all production and by requiring the maintenance of conditions whereby all being made in his image should be able to flourish, Yahweh deconstructs the power of all human idols.
All human idolatrous structures are held to account in the light of God’s covenant requirements, be they the Nimrod-like construction of society by the socialists, or the baalite-like subjugation of all to the unrelenting, dynamics of economic cycles, the demand for growth and the necessarily social inequities which the capitalists view as the proper way of the world. Certainly, the sovereign god gifts to human beings appropriate power and responsibility in order that they may do God’s will and facilitate social and ecological shalom. But humans legitimately receive that power and responsibility in order to bring about God’s purposes; that power is not some intrinsic attribute that may be exercised with carte blanche freedom.
Hence, the Judeo-Christian story, the story of Yahweh the creator and persons being made in Yahweh’s image, is the story of liberation and interpersonal righteousness within a relatively flat, dynamically regulated egalitarian social structure which sought to facilitate social justice and communitarian peace. Hence, as difficult as it is to contextualise the considerations of the biblical covenant so that they may be offered for consideration in the public space of contemporary socio-political discourse, Christians have no choice but to try. We must try to tell that sory today if we are to remain holistic in our understanding and practice of the gospel.
Not only must we be able to tell God’s liberative story as it culminates and takes its definitive shape in Jesus Christ. We must be able to recognise both the points of contact and the points of divergence of God’s story with human socio-political narratives. At times there will appropriate “co-belligerence ” – as Francis Schaeffer used to put it – with some of those other narratives. But at other times there will be sharp, prophetic disagreement; quite often at those points where the dehumanising consequences of those narratives are in danger of taking hold.
To return to the issue of whether or not “the Christian left” or “the Christian right” is an oxymoron; the construction of political space in terms of left and right is part of the old modernist agenda. Postmodernism has taught us to be leery concerning the once supposedly self-evident categories of modernist discourse. Not only is it anachronistic to talk of the biblical story or the gospel as being either right or left wing, such talk displays a lazy attitude towards the hard job of reflecting upon, and acting authentically out of, God’s story today. Rather than do the hard work, it is much easier to simply identify the gospel with either the left or right and get on with one or other basically secular agenda.
Further, the Christian who thinks about the dynamics of God’s covenant and the socio-political framing of God’s story should be the first to see the inadequacy of seeking to shove the gospel through either a leftist or rightist shaped die.
Postmodernism teaches us to be leery of easily heard shibboleths and to be weary of the power dynamics that underlie the use of well-worn ideological rhetoric. So reluctantly, after years of having bought into the Christian leftist story, I’m gradually cancelling my subscription to talk of being left or right. What really counts is one’s intention to be biblical and the concrete outworking, in our communitarian life, of that intention in terms of liberation, justice, righteousness and peace.
André said
Gavin. Your critique of the agenda of groups such as FOCaL (and, by implication, the Maxim Institute) is very acute. The logic that allows Nathan to speak of a “left-wing perspective on Christian truth” is, finally, not so different from the logic that underpins the agenda of those who identify the gospel with the politics of the right. What we have are moves and counter-moves in a game, with little or no reflection on whether the game itself is worth playing, or what the playing-fee might be. It is hard not to see a certain political naiveté at work here, one which in supposing that the gospel needs to be translated into the political idiom of secular, western democracies if it is to be political betrays, perhaps, the same kind of self-delusion evident in the tired calls of some ecclesiastics for the renewal of the “moral foundations” of society, etc. If the latter are perceived by those who actually hold real power and influence (political, cultural, economic, and intellectual) as the inconsequential babblings of the representatives of an institution that is out-of-touch with realities of the world in which we live, it may be that the former, also, cannot wholly free itself from this perception.
What I am suggesting is that attempts to translate the gospel into publicly accessible “political” categories – which in our society means the categories of the left and the right – render Christians politically and culturally irrelevant. Christians who attempt to correlate Christian faith with such categories find themselves in an ironic situation: entry into the game depends upon demonstrating that their religious commitments allow them to make the same moves as other players in the game. Yet, such a demonstration, if it is successful, is effectively a demonstration of the non-political nature of Christian faith, and, consequently, of its political irrelevance.
There is, I have suggested, an element of self-delusion evident in all of this: a willingness to let ourselves be seduced by the inflated sense of importance fostered by conferences, media releases, and discussion groups into believing that we are actually making a difference to those outside of our well-insulated cliques, and a corresponding unwillingness to take the real measure of the kind of game to which through our rhetoric we have committed ourselves. It may be objected that such charges considerably overstate the case. However, the FOCaL group’s belief that they are ‘Keeping the right honest and the church balanced’ (see http: http://www.focal.org.nz/index.htm) betrays a dangerous, even idolatrous, sense of self-importance, one that Augustine in his dealings with the Donatists, who similarly believed themselves to be the agents of the health of the church, equated with a rejection of the one who is alone ‘just and justifying’.
This, of course, is to stray into theological territory, and it might be countered that the claim being made by the FOCaL group is not so much theological as it is political; that is, what is being tabled is the suggestion that there ought to be a voice within the church that is politically left in order to challenge the perceived dominance that the political ideologies of the right exercise within the Christian community. When FOCaL believe themselves to be bringing balance to the church what is at stake is not the doctrine of justification or the doctrine of the atonement, not some question about the Trinity or the sinlessness of Christ; rather, what we are faced with is a question about how Christian belief might best be translated into a form of political action.
I have already suggested that the problem of trying to place Christian faith somewhere on the political spectrum is fraught with difficulty and may, indeed, be self-defeating, in so far as it requires us to identify Christian faith with some political option that is perfectly intelligible without faith. I have also suggested that if we take this option we ought to stop pretending to ourselves that we really believe Christian faith to be political. Now I want to suggest that the attempt to translate Christian faith into a political idiom makes the theological mistake of presupposing that the latter is essentially non-theological, while the former is essentially non-political. What we have are two autonomous idioms. What groups like FOCaL and Maxim are concerned to do is to commend certain ways of relating these idioms. In so doing they reinforce the autonomy of politics and theology. What I am suggesting is that no such attempts can be ultimately successful because Christian faith is already a mode of political speech and action that does not need to be translated into some other mode of political speech and action.
This may seem to some an incredible and hardly justifiable statement to make. Yet, it may be that the Romans were not wholly wrong to perceive the new Christian cult as a political threat to the empire, and not because the early Christians sought to relate their faith to certain factions with Roman politics, but rather because the Christian claim that ‘Jesus is Lord’ witnessed to a reality that both had brought and was bringing about a reordering of human relationships that would undermine the sinful structures of Roman society. None, of course, saw this more clearly than Augustine, who, far from seeking to legitimate the disordered structures of the society of his day (as he is often mistakenly perceived as doing), he contended that the truly just society is only to be identified with that eschatological commonwealth that is both founded and governed by the only just person, and the only person who is able to make others just, Christ. The doctrine of the atonement is, as far as Augustine is concerned, utterly political, and it issues forth in a ‘style’ of politics that emphasises the importance of such theological categories as repentance and conversion, humility and hope, for the proper exercise of government in the earthly city. (Much more should be said here. For an excellent account of Augustine’s theological politics, to which I am indebted, see Robert Dodaro, SJ, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: CUP, 2004).)
Summoned by the Gestapo for questioning, Edith Stein would greet the Gestapo officers with “Gelobt sei Jesus Christ! (Praise be to Jesus Christ!)”. It is difficult to think of an action at once more political or more fraught with risk. Stein understood that the most political thing she could do was simply to proclaim her faith in the risen Lord. FOCaL and, indeed, Maxim, are to be commended for their belief that Christians have something to say to society. However, both groups fail to carry through this belief in so far as their attempts to correlate Christian belief with a political discourse which proclaims itself to be autonomous, are a capitulation to visions of society that are neither disciplined by nor, indeed, rooted in, the eschatological reordering of society brought about by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. What we need are not more fruitless and theologically naive attempts at correlation; what we need is to recapture a sense of the radically political nature of the claims made by the gospel, claims that issue a challenge to those styles of politics that do not admit the lordship of Christ, and which therefore bring about the malformation of human beings.
To maintain that the worship of the Triune God is a political act, to argue that Christian faith and practice is already a mode of politics, does not mean that Christians might not, at certain times and places, say things that are more or less similar to what people with other commitments might say. It is not to deny that over a given amount of time it may be seen that Christians have said things that sound more like things that politicians on the left might say than those on the right (or vice versa). It is not even to deny that Christians are faced with some of the same questions faced by those with other faith commitments (whether they be secular liberals or devout Muslims). As Donald MacKinnon repeatedly insisted (see e.g., ‘Justice’, Theology 66 (1963), 97-104 at 104), Christian faith does not provide the means of escape from the complexities of human life. Instead, the event of God’s self-disclosure sets human life, with all of its complexities and problems, within a new context, and, in so doing, radically transforms them. To talk of Christian political action while simultaneously ignoring this transformation, to conduct our commerce with the political realities of our day without taking stock of the new context within which those realities have been decisively placed, is at best to talk nonsense, and, at worse, to engage in pietistic games which serve the dual task of making Christian faith irrelevant and feeding our self-delusion.
André.
Bruce said
Gavin and Andre have said it all, from my point of view. Of course that never stops me adding a further 2 cents worth.
It seems to me there is a parallel with missiological discussion. Those who disavow engaging the world on its own terms (by marketing for example), are often accused of disengaging from the world and failing in mission to the west. However, we have our own terms of engagement. Rather than failing, we may in fact be treating economic structures in the same way Gavin and Andre think we ought to treat political structures. I think we need to understand that the church is, inasmuch as it is true to its identity and origin and baptism, already both economic within the divine economy and political within the divine polis. As Stanley Hauerwas likes to remind us ‘facing the world’ (in mission)will mean confronting the world non-violently.
Bruce
André said
I very much agree, Bruce. The correlationist projects we have been talking about are, in a sense, the result of the contemporary church’s lack of a properly theological theology of engagement (which, I think we might both claim, ought really to be considered under the theological heading of ‘missiology’).
Gavin: in the interest of furthering the conversation a little, I wondered whether I could query a couple of things you raised? As I mentioned above, I’m very sympathetic to the position you have outlined. But I do have some misgivings about your claims that Christian faith is ‘supremely totalising… the ultimate meta-story’. It seems to me that this runs the risk of mistaking faith with its object, of predicating of faith certain divine attributes which are, properly understood, incommunicable [see note below]. Faith’s task is not to abrogate to itself some kind of totalising status, some ultimate perspective on the world, but to bear witness to the one in whom all things are reconciled. Indeed, it is precisely because this reconciliation takes place ‘under the sign of contradiction’, that is, at the cross, that Christian faith, if it is to be Christian faith, must renounce the temptation to purchase a totalising perspective of the world, even if this renunciation which faith makes requires the cultivation of a profound sense of suspicion towards this same faith. This cultivation is to be identified not with our attempts to practice humility (attempts which, perhaps, we ought to be deeply suspicious of), but rather with the slow and painful process of submitting ourselves to the Lord’s profound interrogation of the secret desires of our hearts. Here, I suspect, we could learn a lot about the drama of faith by closely attending to Jesus’ unmasking, demythologising even(!), of Peter’s sentimental desire to never desert the Lord in his darkest hour, whatever we make of the more upbeat picture of the faithful presented to us in the book of Acts. (And here it should be remembered that if the church does indeed live in the life and the power of the Spirit, Mark has this same Spirit driving Jesus into the wilderness for his own terrible ordeal of being sifted like wheat).
I guess the upshot of all of this (and the preceding remarks would need to be developed a lot further), is the insistence that the faith which bears witness to the crucified Lord is a faith which, far from allowing us to possess some ultimate meta-story, places us on the painful journey in which our lives are rendered increasingly transparent before the searching eyes of the Lord. In other words, if there does exist a via eminentiae (and we perhaps need to be a little more agnostic about this than our confident speech often suggests), the only approach to it must be the via negativa, which is the via crucis. (Indeed, Mark’s suggestion that it is the cross which is the throne of God suggests that the via eminentiae (and not simply the more obviously difficult via negativa) is itself not something which can be apprehended outside of the via crucis.)
The second thing I have been wondering about re: your comments has to do with your appeal to ‘personalist’ language. I very much like the way that your use of this language occurs in the context of your exposition of the narrative of Israel’s relation to YHWH. But I do wonder whether such concepts get us as far as we think they do. Anyone familiar (as you are) with the complicated history of Trinitarian theology will know of the profound hesitancy on the part of theologians from the both the west and the east to specify exactly what is being said when the term ‘persona’ or ‘hypostasis’ is predicated of the Father, Son, and Spirit. As Augustine claims (and he was, I think, expressing a theological common-place), we say three personae not because we know what we are saying, but rather, because we need some way of distinguishing the three. (Taking this a little further, David Brown suggested in 1985 that it might be best to talk simply of ‘the three’, leaving the space blank as it were. This suggestion may be faulty for a number of reasons, but Brown’s agnosticism is not entirely at odds with the spirit (if not the letter) of the tradition here).
Such complicated and vexing theological issues may seem irrelevant to the question of the precise mileage to be had of concepts which are, if we admit it or not, philosophical. But if we are to make proper use of the kind of philosophical categories provided by John Macmurray or Martin Büber in our efforts to explicate the gospel, we ought not to forget the theological provenance of some of these categories (even if this provenance has been exaggerated by some theologians). At any rate, if we admit that the patristic theologians were on to something when they thought that the category of ‘person(hood)’ was a pretty slippery one when applied to the intra-divine reality, then we are at the very least faced with a case where the meaning and use of the word ‘person’ is anything but settled. Indeed, perhaps it is the very lack of settlement – the sense that we don’t quite know the full measure of what we are saying, even if we know what we are trying to rule out – which is important here. Yet, I suspect that you and I would both want to go further than this and say that the claim that humans are persons is not entirely unrelated to the theological claim that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three persons. This begs what to me ought perhaps to be regarded as one of the most basic questions an authentically Christian humanism must face, that is: what is the precise nature of the relationship between these two claims? This is where I get stuck, for at least two reasons. The first, as I have already suggested, is that I’m not really sure what it means to say that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three persons. Or rather, while I have my suspicions about what is being ruled out here, I’m not at all sure about what the positive content of such a claim might be. The second reason is that there is a gap between human personhood and divine personhood. In fact, I’m tempted to claim that the dissimilarity between the two is, in the end, greater than any similarity (which I understand is a principle that is central to understanding how theological language works). The best I can come up with at the moment is that Christian talk of human personhood ought, in some way or other, to be disciplined by talk of the intra-divine personhood, which is itself disciplined by the self-disclosure of the Triune God within the economy. But how exactly is the word ‘disciplined’ functioning here? One thing it is doing here is ruling out any kind of settled account of personhood… and if that is a pretty small thing to do, it’s nevertheless a valuable one. But surely we need to say more?
So, I end up stammering over what most people take to be straightforward concept. It might be tempting at this point simply to say that the language of ‘personhood’ points to a way of framing identity in relational terms… or something like that. But I suspect that we would pretty soon find ourselves in the same place with such a definition. What, after all, do we mean by that incredibly vague term ‘relational’? And why should we call humans ‘persons’ in the first place?
Well, I’ll leave it here. If you or anyone else has any further thoughts on these issues, I would be glad to hear of them.
André
Note: The way I have phrased this risks begetting more confusion – it doesn’t make much sense to say that God is ‘supremely totalising’. What I think I mean is that it may, perhaps, be possible to use such phrases of the gospel. But this begs more questions: under what cultural/intellectual/political conditions would such talk be meaningful? Why would you want to make such claims? Does the gospel actually require such claims to be made? In the background to these questions is Karl Barth’s comment in Evangelical Theology that Christians ought to have no interest in claiming that Christian theology is the best or truest theology there is. We have to take seriously the traditional claim that the Gospel is self-authenticating. I don’t want to suggest that this completely rules out statements such as ‘The Gospel is the ultimate meta-story’ (which is a statement you don’t explicitly make), but it may make us pause a little before we say such things).
Nathan said
Hmmm… I guess organising a conference is akin to creating a work of art in terms of how you are expressing something deep within you that wants to get out, you’re hoping someone will in some way appreciate and be uplifted by what you do, and you are opening yourself up for ridicule and rejection.
As expressed in the article heading this thread, the motivation for this conference was 1. to provide a forum for like-minded Christians to get together, 2. to encourage dialogue in the Christian community, and 3. to foster better church-politician relations. Alas #3 didn’t happen with the ariport being closed and most of the contributing MPS being stranded in various parts of the country! But, #1 was achieved, and the very existence of Focal has obviously succeded in getting #2 going.
Naturally, when Christians start talking about you not everything they say will be positive, Focal has already begun attracting negative comments as “left-wing Christians obviously won’t believe in the Bible or the biblical model of the family.”
Even during the conference we faced a min-rebellion from the floor as some participants seemed to begin to percieve the very nature of the conference itself as being oppressive. That mood seemed to dissipate when we broke for workshops to discuss concrete issues in smaller groups. Also, here we see Andre criticising us as naive, arrogant, self-deluded and not having a “proper theological theology of engagement.”
There is undoubtedly a lot of truth to many of these criticisms (except not believing in the biblical model of family, I do think it’s patently obvious that there’s far more than one model in scripture!), which is what makes criticisms hard to handle. Yes, we are naive, yes we are arrogant, yes we are as self-deluded as any other human on this planet, but I totally reject what Andre wrote above…
“The logic that allows Nathan to speak of a “left-wing perspective on Christian truth” is, finally, not so different from the logic that underpins the agenda of those who identify the gospel with the politics of the right. What we have are moves and counter-moves in a game, with little or no reflection on whether the game itself is worth playing, or what the playing-fee might be.”
Handling legitimate criticism is hard enough, but comments like that are quite depressing and totally unjust. I defy anyone who was actually at the conference, or who actually has engaged with what we’ve said or what the speakers we invited presented, to affirm that as true. We are TOTALLY aware of the dangers of imposing foreign phillosophical categories on the faith; we debated and reflected ad nauseum about whether to use the word ‘left’ or if we should pretend neutrality and hide our bias.
It is a bit distressing to know that people will read that about us in this issue of Stimulus, but hopefully seeing it in context will help people ascertain it’s legitimacy.
Unfortunately Christians do not exist in some culture-less void, we do live in the world and are influenced by our surrounding society. Thus, rightly or wrongly, some Christians will naturally err towards what society labels ‘left’ or ‘right’ (whether that is through their faith influencing their politics or the politics influencing their faith). We as individuals tended to err towards the left – though by no means uncritically as some people seem to assume – and so we decided to chose the path of openess and honesty by making that public.
Perhaps our ‘theology of engagement’ is faulty, perhaps we should’ve hidden our leanings, but at least we ARE engaging! Rightly or wrongly my reading of the Bible leads me (undoubtedly arrogantly and naively) to percieve some (but not by any means all) aspects of Christianity currently associated with the ‘right’ as a distortion of the faith (though of course God is bigger than my brain and I’m aware that my perspective is limited).
These include condoning war and violence; attitudes of unforgiveness and vindictiveness towards criminals; a tolerance of racism; encouraging tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor; the persuit of materialism; limited concern for God’s good creation; a very narrow and un-biblical view of the family; a desire to legislate Christian morality on believers and un-believers alike; and the assertion that our theology is the ‘truth’ and that anyone who disagrees isn’t a real Christian.
Of course many Christians who vote National would dissapprove of these as well, but for me it was the impetus to get involved in Focal. And, as I said, criticise us as much as you like but at least we are engaging. At least we are doing something to present a different interpretation of the faith to Christians on a national level.
I for one am proud of what we’ve achieved so far.
André Muller said
Hey Nathan. Thanks for your comments. I really appreciate the obvious passion you have for getting Christians to engage with their culture at a political level. However, I am a little disappointed with some aspects of your response.
1. In your post which opened this thread you made it clear that the FOCaL group were open to serious criticism (‘You’re free to disagree with us but let’s discuss why’). Yet, in your response you make the claim, ‘criticise us as much as you like but at least we are engaging’. This statement seems to indicate quite a different attitude than that indicated by the first statement. The kind of critical – even rigorously critical – dialogue that the first statement points to cannot be sustained under the conditions stipulated in the second statement. Good critical dialogue – which does involve misunderstanding and revision etc. – cannot happen when one party has the wildcard – ‘well, whatever you say, at least…’, which can be pulled out when that party correctly or incorrectly perceives itself to be unjustly under attack. The very existence of that wildcard undermines the difficult process of critical discussion.
2. You seem to suggest that those of us who did not attend the FOCaL conference are not really in a position to make informed comments either about your initial post, or, more broadly, on the FOCaL agenda itself. I can see why you might feel this way. But I believe that, to both the credit of yourself and those who put together the FOCaL website, the FOCaL agenda has been clearly articulated. I’m sorry that did not attend the conference, but I do think that it’s possible to engage with the FOCaL agenda without having done so. What I should clearly state is the obvious enough point that my comments are in response to this agenda as it has been articulated by yourself in your initial posting (and by the FOCaL group on the website).
3. I believe that you have misinterpreted some of my comments. That’s entirely understandable – I don’t express things very clearly on the best of days! Furthermore, misinterpretation – and clarification – are just normal features of critical dialogue anyway. So now, some clarification (I hope):
(a) The charge of arrogance was not, in any sense, intended to be taken personally. I know three or four of the people involved in the FOCaL group (including yourself), and have a great deal of personal admiration for them. The charge was directed toward a particular agenda expressed in the FOCaL statement ‘Keeping the right honest, and the church balanced’. I have no qualms about the first part of this statement (excepting only that it does not go far enough – why keep the right honest and so reinforce its agenda, when you can issue a full-scale critique of the right?). But the claim that FOCaL are, or intend to be, ‘keeping… the church balanced’ is theologically arrogant for the simple reason that it assumes responsibility for something that lies entirely outside of the sphere of things that humans are responsible for. The theology of this is straightforward enough. The church lives not by her own life but by the Spirit of her Lord, a Lord who is the agent of his own presence. The health of the church is not something that humans can secure; to think so is to think that the life of the Spirit (which is the Spirit himself) is something in our possession, something for us to attain, or to manage responsibly or irresponsibly. To claim that the Lord is the agent of his own presence is to judge all human attempts to secure the health of the church as attempts to question grace itself. (The locus-classicus of this discussion was the Donatist controversy in the 5th C.). The task for believers is not, then, to attempt to secure the health of the church, but to bear faithful witness to the one by whose power the church is enabled to be and to become what she is called to be and to become. (Incidentally, I myself do not believe that the Church is called to be ‘balanced’… but, if I am wrong about this, my point still stands).
(b) In no way were my comments intended to suggest that Christians ‘exist in some culture-less void’. In the last paragraph of my post, I made it clear that I do not believe that the Christian Gospel enables us to escape the complexities of life – whether these complexities are social, political, economic, cultural, or religious. Rather, I believe that the Gospel transforms the way we perceive these complexities: it provides a narrative that orders, or should order, our engagement with the complexities of the world. I think you have mistaken my advocation for a different style of engagement with society from that which you are offering, with a position that seeks a disengagement from society. But this assumes the very thing I am disputing, namely the idea that there are only two options – correlating the gospel with politics, or denying that the gospel is political. I am suggesting that there are other options to explore, specifically, one that maintains that the gospel is already a political narrative and does not need to be translated into another political narrative. After all, it makes no sense to translate one political narrative into another political narrative.
4. Finally, I am genuinely pleased that you feel that I am mistaken regarding the FOCaL group’s willingness to engage in seriously reflection upon the kind of game that the group have committed themselves to by their stated agenda. The question, I guess, is what form does this reflection take? (In this sense, my comments were imprecise… by the way, I hope they aren’t printed in the stimulus journal – they were written for this forum, not for publication in print!). My comment was probably shaped a little by something that occurred (or, as it turns out, didn’t occur!) earlier this year. I posted an e-mail in the FOCaL discussion group in reply to a post by Steve. In this post I invited Steve (and by implication, anyone else in the FOCaL group), to engage in the kind of reflection I mentioned above. To make it easy, I suggested some questions which we could think about. Unfortunately, as I received no reply from members of FOCaL, I concluded that they were not interested in such questions (or, perhaps, thought that other questions were more urgent). I genuinely hope I am wrong about this. One way to find out would be to re-pose some of these questions. So here goes:
(a) What might the doctrine of the Trinity mean for Christian political action?
(b) How might the doctrine of the atonement issue in a style of political action that is different from styles of political action that are not disciplined by reference to the reconciliation of humanity to God in the life, death, and resurrection of the second member of the Trinity?
(c) In what ways might a fully robust theological account of humanity differ from the immanentist and non-eschatological narratives that drive secular western democracy?
Nathan, here is the crux of the matter, to me anyway: If I got the sense that these were ‘live’ questions for the FOCaL group, that members of this group met together in order to discuss seriously and vigorously these questions because they believed that by seeking to answer such questions we were thrust to the heart of a Christian understanding of political action, I would have no hesitancy in giving my full support to FOCaL. But my own experience (both from the discussion group which was once on the FOCaL website, and the official statements made by FOCaL) is that if it is allowed that answering such questions is a matter of professional interest to the theological student, doing so is not considered something that requires the utmost urgency and dedication on the part of the FOCaL group. My challenge to the group is to prove me wrong. I very much hope they do.
Kind regards,
André
Nathan said
Yes, sorry Andre, it was a bit of a rant.
I did invite people to disagree with us and I hope that I meant it! I was kind of thinking along the lines of judging a tree by its fruits rather than condemning the tree for existing though. Not that you were necessarily doing that, but enough people have recently that seeing your critiques published in Stimulus did provoke the aforementioned rant.
Prior to the conference I didn’t think our small group had actually produced much fruit – except of course choosing a name. How would the discussion so far have been different if we’d called ourselves “the Forum of Christian Progressives”? Apart from FOCaP not sounding nearly as cool as FOCaL, and missing out on the opportunity for some witty word-puns, I imagine that the above thread would’ve evolved quite differently.
But, around the election, the public Christian voice re politics did seem disturbingly homogenous and un-reflective. One of our goals was to stimulate some much needed critical thinking on politics and the gospels’ place in it, and if FOCaL has played a small role in doing that I’m pleased. Hopefully that won’t be restricted to academic and clerical circles, but begin to be felt in local congregations as well. Also, now that the conference papers have been published, hopefully the discussion can broaden somewhat from the issues inherent in the choice of the name.
Yes, I do remember you posing those questions last year, and yes, I do remember hoping someone would respond while not responding myself. They’re profound questions and fundamental to our engagement in politics. Although we are not primarily a grouping of theologians and many of us are more visceral than cerebral in our faith, right from the beginning we were committed to engaging with and reflecting on serious Christian theology.
I can only answer for why I personally didn’t respond, though I would’ve loved some discussion to ensue. That was because, though I am one of the people associated with FOCaL that does have a theology degree, I majored in Biblical Studies! Although the Trinity and Atonement are central tenets to my faith, greatly influencing my attitudes to politics, I didn’t see myself as having a worthy contribution to make in a public forum. I find that I personally dwell more on the gut-level incarnational “what would Jesus do,” than the over-arching theological level. I had hoped FOCaL could stimulate others to start talking about such issues rather than seeing us having the resources to do it ourselves.
But, if contributing my thoughts does get this needed discussion going, then I will do it.
1. Trinity.
- This says to me that the heart of our faith is relational and based on community, even to the very core nature of our creator. Thus I come to the conclusion that in a Christian framework the individual is not paramount.
- I see the love of the Trinity as essentially outward-looking, overflowing and inclusive; 2 members eternally coming together out of love for the third. So I see us, the fruit of creation, coming out of the overflow of this love. God loves all and desires to include all, is this a good model for our politics? This gives dignity to each individual, should this be reflected in Christian attitudes to institutions and policies and how they affect all in society – especially those on the margins? I also extrapolate from this that people are more important than $, and the quest for material gain is not humanity’s greatest good.
- The natural world also results from and is included in God’s love, thus it too is holy and to be respected (though in practical terms this does happen for me at a lower level than other people, ‘cos I do still squash flies).
- God created but then stood back and allowed creation to grow and evolve. God doesn’t impose Godself on us. A godly, Christian love is not controlling, can advise but does not impose ourselves on others; rather it gives space for life and independence. How does that relate Christian morality in the public sphere? I believed that de-criminalizing prostitution would be detrimental to society as a whole but I felt reluctant about the idea of legislating my beliefs on society. When should a Christian intervene and how?
2. Atonement.
- If God has forgiven me of all the things I’ve done through the life, death and resurrection of my Lord, then surely this should inform my view of the court system and penal reform in some way? While of course trying to prevent the creation of new victims.
- What is the model of justice inherent in the atonement theory we hold to? How can that be held up against our government and power structures?
3. Anthropology.
- We are made of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, capable of great good and great evil. My Calvinist background of total depravity hasn’t left me, so I firmly believe that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. There must always be checks and balances in the democratic system – though less efficient, on an idealistic level the more hands power is in the better. So I’m a fan of MMP.
You are a much more gifted and studied theologian than I, so would you care to share your thoughts on these matters? How would you (and others I hope) answer your questions?
Floria Aemilia said
A slice of Paul Tillich to address these issues, and “balance” the theological positivism voiced above, which tends to the opposite “pole” from Tillich himself:
“A theological system is supposed to satisfy two basic needs: the statement of the truth of the Christian message and the interpretation of this truth for every new generation. Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received. Not many theological systems have been able to balance these two demands perfectly. Most of them either sacrifice elements of the truth or are not able to speak to the situation. Some of them combine both shortcomings. Afraid of missing the eternal truth, they identify it with some previous theological work, with traditional concepts and solutions, and try to impose these on a new, different situation. They confuse eternal truth with a temporal expression of this truth. This is evident in European theological orthodoxy, which in America is known as fundamentalism. When fundamentalism is combined with an anti theological bias, as it is, for instance, in its biblicistic-evangelical form, the theological truth of yesterday is defended as an unchangeable message against the theological truth of today and tomorrow. Fundamentalism fails to make contact with the present situation, not because it speaks from beyond every situation, but because it speaks from a situation of the past. It elevates something finite and transitory to infinite and eternal validity. In this respect fundamentalism has demonic traits. It destroys the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and it makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware.
“Fundamentalists in America and orthodox theologians in Europe can point to the fact that their theology is eagerly received and held by many people just because of the historical or biographical situation in which men find themselves today. The fact is obvious, but the interpretation is wrong. “Situation,” as one pole of all theological work, does not refer to the psychological or sociological state in which individuals or groups live. It refers to the scientific and artistic, the economic, political, and ethical forms in which they express their interpretation of existence. The “situation” to which theology must speak relevantly is not the situation of the individual as individual and not the situation of the group as group. Theology is neither preaching nor counseling; therefore, the success of a theology when it is applied to preaching or to the care of souls is not necessarily a criterion of its truth. The fact that fundamentalist ideas are eagerly grasped in a period of personal or communal distintegration does not prove their theological validity, just as the success of a liberal theology in periods of personal or communal integration is no certification of its truth. The “situation” theology must consider is the creative interpretation of existence, an interpretation which is carried on in every period of history under all kinds of psychological and sociological conditions. The “situation” certainly is not independent of these factors. However, theology deals with the cultural expression they have found in practice as well as in theory and not with these conditioning factors as such. Thus theology is not concerned with the political split between East and West, but it is concerned with the political interpretation of this split. Theology is not concerned with the spread of mental diseases or with our increasing awareness of them, but it is concerned with the psychiatric interpretation of these trends. The “situation” to which theology must respond is the totality of man’s creative self-interpretation in a special period. Fundamentalism and orthodoxy reject this task, and, in doing so, they miss the meaning of theology.”
Both the denial of theology’s dependence on human thought, and the reduction to human ways of thinking, result in oversimplification of the issues.
“Neither a Tillich nor a Barth be”
- Anon.
Andre said
Nathan, sorry for taking such a long time to reply to your posting. I’m currently overseas, and will try to respond when I get back to NZ at the end of this month.
Floria, I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘theological positivism’. Could you perhaps unpack this phrase a little? Also, who is this criticism directed towards?
Kind regards,
Andre.