The Proletariat of God

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an essay about a speech Barack Obama gave on religion in democracy. Posted here is another paragraph of that speech, where Barack Obama gives us an exposition of what the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac means theologically, and what it means (by contrast) politically. His distinction is very indicative:

"We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded. Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God’s test of devotion. But it’s fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham."

Abraham will have arrived at that place, on the roof of a building (or mountain), raising a knife to his son, by remaining silent, Kierkegaard says. He will have allowed himself to speak of any other possible thing: "He can say everything, but one thing he cannot say, and if he cannot say that—that is, say it in such a way that the other understands it—then he is not speaking." In other words, if the one thing Abraham cannot speak to Sarah, or to Eliezer, or to Isaac himself is the one thing that could eliminate the terrifying void of anxiety and fear he faces in violating universal ethics: "I'm going to kill my son because God is telling me to," then everything else he could say enacts nothing of any substance. Nothing else can reduce his anxiety except the one thing he cannot say. Kierkegaard says, "At every moment, Abraham can stop; he can repent of the whole thing as a spiritual trial; then he can speak out, and everybody will be able to understand him—but then he is no longer Abraham." But that is precisely where we approach Abraham's experience without feeling his fear and anxiety. We know killing your son is supposed to be wrong, so we believe that God would never have really let Abraham go through with it. But if Abraham knows that, then his entire experience is absurd and immoral.


Barack Obama here is focused on that moment where Abraham's anxiety is eliminated, just as most of us are. He says "of course." Of course God intercedes. Of course Abraham does not violate the universal. Of course the test of devotion would never have included this. That is the "of course" of a member of the civic religion, who believes only in the values of faith that can be universalized. He appeals to our desire to tame God, to believe that God has a belief system, that he has rules. To Barack Obama, one individual encountering God himself above the universal is the highest abnegation of the civic religion. To us, there should be no scintilla of our faith that is not particular, that does not express the audacity of hoping for true communion with God no matter what anyone else values.

This is why Barack Obama is right about democracy and right about religion. We cannot bring faith in a God who transcends everything we hold in common as good and noble into the congregation of democracy. We cannot create laws to express the anxiety of God calling us into a relationship that defies all reason or force of law. An absurd leap, the kind a person makes when falling in love, or that a woman makes if she risks her own life to give birth to a child, or that any Christian makes in believing a man rose from the dead, has no place in democracy. In the midst of the temptations we face, where the vicissitudes of a relationship with a God who inhabits us with a spirit we cannot fathom clash with the ossified ethical structures of society, our best chance at imitating Christ remains a willingness to be terrified. We must be terrified by the prospect of an all-loving God asking us to depict his love against all we are asked to hold dear by that grasp at control we call 'society'. That terror has no place in this society, and so we really are left with a choice. Will we believe in a suffering Christ, believe in a resurrected Christ, against the lack of value suffering holds in American life, or against any proof that resurrection of the dead actually happens? Will we defy the most deeply cherished values of American society because God has invited us to? Or will we be looking up from the open doors of the church, calling the police, because a man is about to murder his son?

A quote from Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, on the practice of "getting back to the Bible":

"We must learn from the experience alike of Judaism and Christianity that Scripture without an interpretive tradition is dumb and useless. This does not mean that any old tradition will do, but that it is a delusion to imagine (as apparently some of the Reformers did) that Scripture is self-interpreting. Some element of tradition, some theological presuppositions are essential if we are to succeed in interpreting Scripture at all."

Evangelicalism is a tradition that believes it is unencumbered by tradition. Some evangelicals believe that "theology" is something that gets in the way of "the Bible," as if the Bible is not theological, not written by theologians, and not translated into English by....theologians. I've grown up as an evangelical, I know what our traditions are, and I know the valid range of interpretations for the Bible that evangelicals accept. I recently read a book about a high view of Scripture for evangelicals. It had nowhere to go except to conclude that the Bible needs a community of believers to interpret it, and that community must be linked to past generations of believers. I agree with Hanson, that it doesn't mean that any old tradition will do, which is why I don't think it necessarily follows when a person decides tradition is essential for Scripture for him to become Catholic or Orthodox.

Yesterday, after the election, I was reminded of a speech Barack Obama gave some months ago, a portion of which I had tucked away in the drafts waiting to be posted on my very taciturn blog. I pulled it out today because it is apt for those Christians who've been caught up in the fervor of Obama's victory:

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason…Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing."

This is a perfect exposition of the central doctrine of the religion that William Herberg called "The American Way of Life" and what Reinhold Neibuhr called "the civil religion of America." That religion in one word is "democracy." Obama's novel augmentation of this concept becomes clear when we remember what President Eisenhower said: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is." What Obama is making explicit here is what Herberg believes is the shift from "religions of democracy" to "democracy as religion." No longer is religion conceived as a necessary symbiote with which the natural tenets of a democratic society co-exist. Though we still believe that "to have faith" can properly have no object in America, what Barack Obama has advanced here is the permutation we have anticipated since our founding. Here, religion only has value as it can be universalized according to American values. This must inevitably lead to a leveling of the distinctions between religions that ultimately vitiates all religions. If all religious beliefs must conform to democratic principles, then religion has not constructed our democracy's values, democracy is our religion. Freedom of religion need never be challenged; the religious have abrogated religion in service to democracy.

Barack Obama has positioned himself as the most perfect expression of the hero of American civil religion. The American way of life is itself the common belief of Americans in idealism. We form a spiritual structure around the ideals we cling to in a way no other people group does. We apply this idealism to everything: free speech, home ownership, getting a raise, educating children, eating a hamburger (or not), etc. Everything in an American's life has a moral value, and because that creates enormous pressure on us as individuals, we gravitate toward symbols of our idealism to reduce our cognitive dissonance. And because we are so idealistic, "[we] tend to confuse espousing an ideal with fulfilling it and are always tempted to regard [our]selves as good as the ideals [we] entertain." Though not a quixotic individual (despite what his detractors say), the force of our president-elect's rhetoric has appealed primarily to our ideals for what America should mean and what a president should look like. The panegyrical frenzy of this post-election day is an expression of the religious ecstasy enrapturing the denizens of the civil religion, the parochial qualities of our formal religions adumbrated by the refulgent catholicity of the personified ideal. And lest I appear partisan, suffice it to say that McCain was not an anti-hero, but simply a rival for the same seat.

We have separated church and state so successfully that the state is now a church. A nation desires unity in what it values most deeply, and a system that functions both to organize those beliefs into a coherent rubric and to disseminate a sanctioned constellation of valid actions. Democracy is that system, not the aggregate of our variegated religions. Even if parts of Christianity were allowed into the public realm (as they ostensibly are), we would be allowed only the disembodied ethic and not the theology driving the ethic. More importantly, the supremely sanctioned act, the most cherished sacrament of democracy which needs no other religion's support, is exercising the right to vote. The sanguine glow on the faces of Obama supporters these days is the radiance of a common desire to realize our ideals compressed into that single, cathartic act of voting.

So why didn't I vote? Quite simply, because my religion is specific. A peculiar God chose one man, Abraham, to form a people he would favor above all others, with whom he would have direct contact. He nurtured personal encounters with only a few of them, episodic theophanies giving way to a sustained revelation of his presence in Jesus Christ. Jesus chose twelve men to confide in, three were his closest friends. He died once, in an obscure corner of an empire that has been gone for centuries, in an age where the only way of documenting such a life was word of mouth and papyrus. For centuries, people have had ineluctable encounters with his Spirit, often unable to explain or translate what they experienced. And this same group of people, serving the same God, is being asked to universalize their beliefs by abandoning the experiences that created them?

Democracy has demanded an impossible thing from us.

"Surely, he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him."
(Isaiah 53 : 4-5)

This text is actually a conflation of these two verses, which are given here in the NIV:

Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

This chorus carries the theme of derision from the alto air before it (He Was Despised), and of course the haunting "Behold the Lamb of God" before the air. This chorus is once again a troubled one, with the strings driving forcefully against the chorus' sustained minor progressions.
I find this chorus very a propos given my study of the nature of Christ in his humanity and divinity for my doctoral seminar. Athanasius points out in his Contra Arianos that Christ did not "cure our diseases" but that he "took up our infirmities." He says, "He became human. He did not enter into a human being." Christ's suffering was our suffering because he took on our humanity as his own. The manner of his restoration of creation, of the healing of our sins and wounds was to be punished for them in his very being. It is rather en vogue these days to deride the penal substitutionary view of atonement, but I think it can be a rather apt and very biblical way of describing what Christ accomplished for us on the cross, especially in this case. "The punishment that brought us peace was upon him."

"Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." This is a dark, majestic, weighty chorus. At once, it conjures the image of John's proclamation of Jesus' salvific mission as he approached the waters of the Jordan, and the spectacle of his death on the cross. The mystery of Jesus' divine union with our humanity was displayed as the Holy Spirit descended on his baptism and as he hung dying as our sacrifice. There have been, over the years, several depictions in film of Jesus' crucifixion. What struck me about all of them, as I look back, is how much of a hurry they seem to be in. Granted, Jesus' crucifixion was novel in terms of Roman practice. Crucifixion was supposed to be not only a slow death, but a humiliating one, as the person often took several days to die. That Jesus and the thieves who hung beside him were cut down the same day was abnormal. Still, what is missing from all of the film depictions I have seen of Jesus' death on the cross is how brutal and lonely it must have been. He hung there for hours, and though he uttered several important things while on the cross, most likely he said nothing most of the time. Crucifixion is like drowning just inches below the surface of the water. Contemplate his stark, unendurable time on the cross as you listen to this chorus.

In 2005 I wrote a series of posts on Handel's Messiah as a way of avoiding the usual humbuggery I engage in at Christmastime. My friend Eva invited me to a performance of the Messiah in two weeks, and as part of the excitement, I thought I would repost those old blogs and perhaps add some new ones (I say "perhaps" because I'm very busy with a doctoral seminar at the moment and can't make any promises). So here are the hyper links for them, in order from top to bottom oldest to newest:

• Introduction to the Messiah
• Comfort Ye
• And the Glory of the Lord
• And He Shall Purify
• O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion
• Behold, Darkness Shall Cover the Earth
• For Unto Us a Child is Born
• Glory to God in the Highest
• He Shall Feed His Flock

I know that memes are supposed to be community-builders and networking devices, but in my case it will be sad testament to the fact that I have let my blog lie fallow for too long. *a single tear seeping from the corner of my eye...

The meme is to pick up the book nearest you, go to page 123, find the fifth sentence and share the next three sentences. You should go look at Mark's, because his was interesting, and if you really want to see a meme go somewhere, that's another reason to look at Mark's. Here's mine, which is going to be very apt:

"It is no wonder that the Corinthians understood Paul's language about the resurrection of the body to refer to the crass resuscitation of a corpse. For one thing, as I have shown above, that would be the most obvious interpretation of the term he employs. Moreover, that is apparently just what many Jews and Christians thought when they considered the resurrection of the body."

--from The Corinthian Body, by Dale Martin

Tomorrow I will board a flying aero-vessel that will transport me across the mighty Atlantic Ocean to the land of the Turks. The Turcoman is swarthy (I am told), with a long, spindly black beard and colorful robes. He is taken to wild dancing and military exhibitions with the scimitar and composite bow, all the while demonstrating remarkable flexibility with his athletic feats. I have adopted the customs of these fearsome Ottomans, allowing my face-hair to grow in bushy swaths and donning pointy shoes and a sequined vest. I assume that, barring any serious language difficulties, I will be accepted as one of them within moments.

I will be gone from tomorrow, January 9th, to January 19th. During that time I will be traveling to Istanbul, to another city whose name escapes me, and through the countryside of these exotic Mohammedans. I will return with the sweet attar of foreign customs still wafting in my nostrils, having only recently also chewed some of their most excellent and non-heinous food. Be excellent to each other while I am gone, and I will post further developments in my adventure as occasion to visit the telegraph station permits.