Intellectual Responsibility

"It is the responsibility of intellectuals to take dissident positions, privilege confers opportunity and opportunity means obligation."

--Chomsky

Okay, so I'm no fan of Chomsky as a linguist. He wants to find all of the commoln threads between languages and I think that the beauty of diverse languages is in their differences. But I think I can get on board with this quote.

I believe that the movement against concentrated power is as much a part of God's design for humanity as acts of personal conscience. I have a good friend who is really struggling with his position as a subordinate party in a missions endeavor. The issue comes down to their faith in their own designs verses his faith in God's (rather obvious) plan.

Gina and Steve and I are also struggling with the situation at church. We are at a loss about what to do. The elders (I really wanted to put that in quotation marks) have, as I mentioned before, decided that they want to remove the preacher for, in their own words, putting "the Word of God" above their requests. The question becomes: in the fulfillment of the role of prophet, which the preacher must take, is the preacher a prophet of God or of the Elders? I say that he is the prophet of God and the Elders should be accountable to the word of God; they say that is is a prophet of the elders (like Aaron to moses?) and that the elders are accountable to no one. If I am correct, then the check on a preacher's power is The Word of God (as understood in the community of faith) and the elders have a responsibility to make sure that he fulfills that task. The check on the elders is the Word of God (as understood in the community of faith) and the preacher holds them to that standard.

If the authority of either party outweighs the Word of God, then evil men pursuing evil actions will always win. They will always win because, once the Word of God is rejected, there is no check on power and unchecked power attracts evil people; evil people will use any means to get what they want, but good people will not, therefore, evil people will always win when power is not checked by something.

I'm not saying that the elders here are evil, but I am saying that they are defying God and opening the door for evil. So what do we do? "Do not resist evil, but overcome evil with good." Yes, but how. I don't know . . . and it is obvious that the earliest church did not know either, otherwise they would not have ended up with money-grubbing, power-hungry, despotic, and evil men running the church into the deepest levels of depravity during the middle ages. What I do know is that I cannot in good faith either support ungodliness or rebellion against God nor can I seek to incite rebellion against the eldership. Should we leave? Should we stay? We can't really do either easially.

Gina and Steve, though they have been here much longer than I, have formed no attachment to the church here, and I am not even an official member. So, leaving poses no difficulty from that standpoint, but we have no place to go . . . the only other cofC is a post-Boston movement church in recovery, and it would be somewhat unfair to go there only for the next year until Steve retires and they move. I would say "stay," but I'm afraid that our pressence would be a further divisive influence, and who wants to help cause more division? Besides that, we all feel like the victims of an abusive and cheeting spouse who has left us to pursue someone else, whom he or she wanted. You can't just take the abuse, and you can't fight back, either you leave or you accept the violence directed at you as right, staying only insures that the abusive adulterer will continue cheating and abusing.I'd say we need counseling as a church, but the elders would have to be the ones to seek that, and they have shown no interest in relying on the wisdom of others.

So, what do we do?

"The stereotype is not simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixed form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (that the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significance of psychic and social relations."

--Homi Bhabha

Though Bhabha obscures an often overlooked truth with his legendary BAD writing, his point is not lost on me. Prejudice is not wrong because the stereotypes constructed are incorrect; very often stereotypes really do reflect the behaviors of many (sub)cultures. The problem is that those stereotypes take on a different meaning outside the boundaries of their own cultures, therefore their representation is skewed by the very act of attempting to represent them.

San Diego monument removal

In this extremely biased article, The voice of San Diego reports that a cross that serves as a memorial monument is the target of a legal suit. In short, an ACLU lawyer, working for an atheist veteran who, evidently believes that his anti-faith is more important than the present and past faiths of other veterans, is trying to tear down a cross. Christian groups are angry and have been fighting back in the courts and newspapers and ballot box.

I have mixed feelings about this. I'd like to say I'm all for preserving crosses and ten commandment monuments everywhere, I am. But I'm not for that as a Christian but as a supporter of art.

1. As a Christian, I can't help thinking that we've missed the point. The cross is not a good symbol of our salvation, it is a symbol of our shame. We have no equivalent symbol in our society, but maybe an electric chair, it represents the death of a criminal, or better a syringe, because of lethal injection and because, though we might not understand the symbol (as the cross would not have been understood in the first century) if you heard someone talking about the glorious syringe, you would expect them to be ashamed, not because of lethal injection, but because of drugs (so I guess that doesn't really work either, but it's closer).

2. I am confused by the belief that Christianity ought to be accepted. Christianity has never been what it should be when it was the dominant religion of a country, at least not that I have ever heard. On the contrary, Christians have always, as far as I know, lived the Christian life best as a persecuted minority, as enemies of the state. When Christianity gets involved in politics, it becomes a force for political authority, a tool by which the power-hungry seek to wield domination, a subjugator of the very people whom true Christianity seeks to free.

3. The cross is, to many people in the world, most specifically to European Jews, a symbol of what is perhaps the greatest misuse of Christian symbol, history, and scripture: The Holocaust. Actually, the Holocaust was only the culmination of many centuries of anti-Semitic persecution. Christians who never understood even the smallest part of the life of Jesus, who never realized that the Apostles never left Judaism, that Jesus died a Jew, these Christians blamed the Jews for the death of Jesus. They used the cross to persecute Jews because they did not understand what the gospels make abundantly clear, if read in their original context: WE ALL KILLED JESUS, if the gospels put a focus on the Jewish nation, it is because it was intended to be the primary recipient of the faith, because the people of Israel were/are the people of God. We gentiles have been brought in, but that is just grace, salvation was not for us first, go read Romans 9.

So, maybe we should not be so eager to bring up the cross as a symbol of our faith in every public place because we are often misusing the symbol, because we don't want to be the dominant power behind the government and because, for many Jews, it brings up memories of our persecution of others, rather than our persecution by others and our savior's death as a criminal, an enemy of the state.

One final thought: the crowds, the Jews, and the state were all counted guilty of the death of Jesus in the Gospels. The crowds and the Jews both entered the church in large numbers, but few of the well-born (ευγενεις -ICor 1.26), that is people with hereditary authority, people at the top of societal power, entered the church.

So, I'd vote to keep the monument, because I could not bear not to, but I would not be angry at its removal.

Religion and Government

In most forms of Islam (the Turkish "secular" Islam being the most obvious exception), law and religion are synonymous. That is why Islamic countries have traditionally pursued military conquest. Both Christians and Muslims in the middle ages claimed that conquest was to open the option for people to follow their religion, not to force them to convert. There is, in fact a Qu'anic injunction against converting people by force, and the Bible assumes that Christians are the persecuted masses, not the ruling power.

What developed in the Christian world, thanks to humanism and the resultant secularism, was a view of the priority of faith over "conversion." In other words, the secular nations that developed out of Christian nations have seen the freedom to choose not to be a Christian as equally important as the freedom to choose Christianity.

Many governments that developed from Islamic territories, on the other hand, though they were the most tolerant of the monotheistic and imperial religions through the middle ages, have, in relatively recent times, developed a policy of persecution and conversion by force in many places. Though these policies were pursued by new converts, unfamiliar with the tenants of their new religion even in ancient times, mainstream imperial Islam frowned upon such actions.

Is it possible that the post-Christian nations are able to integrate people of various cultural backgrounds more readily because of this belief in the freedom to choose non-Christian faiths? Is it possible that the recent interpretations of Islam, which seek the forced conversion of non-Muslims have caused many of the crises in the Middle East? Perhaps. It might also be possible that the current trend of the non-secular Islamic regimes to attempt to micro-manage the lives of their citizens, in an attempt to force conformity to their interpretations of Islam, have lost for them the support of many of those under their rule who wish to be true to Islam, but have differing interpretations.

What do you think? I think coersion and domination are evil no matter the religion. I also believe that oppressors of any faith create their own barriars to the faiths which they proclaim, even if their faith is atheism.