It's a truism in the Mimetic Theory community that liberals and conservatives start imitating each other when they get mad. They say opposite things but they say them with the same reciprocal and scapegoating anger.
"You are taking away my freedom! No, you are taking away my life!"
In fact they are not saying all that much opposite things. When it gets down to it each side sees the other as threatening what is of absolute value. (Where in fact would you chose to put liberal and conservative either side of the paragraph above?) At all events the visceral anger is a recipe sooner or later for murder.
And that puts the socially committed Christian in a considerable bind. Indeed a long time before the situation gets to murder a Christian is aware of Jesus' teaching that all kinds of name-calling are against the meaning of the Kingdom and incur the same end-times judgment. To call someone a "fool" brings the whole world crashing down, in the end...
So what do you do as a Christian to raise your voice, to get a hearing, when the stakes are so high and the only voice to get heard is the last one to say the loudest, cruelest thing?
How really do you present something that has enough force and strength to get heard and yet does not re-enter the Colosseum of name-calling?
Jesus was a fantastic speaker and preacher. He used stories that often had a very sharp bite to them (think the parable of the talents, and of the laborers in the vineyard, the virgins and the lamps...). He spoke a clear and present critique of wealth and hypocrisy, plus issued harsh apocalyptic warnings. The sweet Jesus meek and mild can too easily be stripped of these elements. But can we speak like him?
Our situation is complicated because so much of Jesus-style language has been hijacked by fundamentalism, lacking the profound disclosive truth of his own personal journey, and it comes off simply as violent. We are all too aware of how righteous language slips so easily into righteous rivalry.
And yet the need for effective language becomes critical when national politicians employ theology to claim higher ground and do so denying legitimacy to their opponents. Rick Santorum suggested recently that Barack Obama promotes “some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible." Specifically, Obama has "a world view that elevates the earth above man."
Apart from the fact this is holy war politics Santorum also invokes some of the worst elements of popular dualist theology to discredit Obama's policies. His deformed viewpoint can be well answered by those in the theological know but how can it be countered on a more general or populist level? How can we do the kind of thing Jesus did, addressing multitudes?
One answer is to provide a different positive language to people and to do so by insisting in season and out of season on this new language. Then it's not a matter of kicking up dust in Santorum's face down in the arena but gradually making a way of thinking and speaking so familiar and persuasive that it acts on its own to disqualify his words. What is needed is a new fabric of language that holds together at so many edges that it becomes a dynamic world view in its own right.
To this purpose I offer five theological "talking points" below. They can be added to, changed or reduced: they are not, as the saying goes, set in stone! MT people will recognize the anthropological underpinning and they will surely know how and where all have already been addressed by Girardian scholars. The purpose here is to try to give the language in some bare essentials so that it, or something like, can perhaps progressively become a kind of native theological tongue.
1. Christianity is about a death which catalyzes earthly compassion, not a legal transaction for the sake of eternity. Salvation is a different human relational basis, and grace and the Spirit are the divine agents of a new humanity.
2. Interpretation begins from the end-term of scripture which is God's character as revealed in Jesus, not from a punitive atonement which colors the entire narrative with deep violence. Revelation therefore has its own history. It is seen as a struggle for understanding leading finally to the transformed eye of Jesus' gospel. In this understanding apocalyptic metaphors are not elevated into metaphysics (viz. hell) but are judged both as part of the ongoing struggle for understanding and, again, in the final light of the character of God.
3. Love is the definition of election, election is not the definition of love. Augustine and Calvin introduced a destructive principle into Christian thought by placing sovereign election as a principle superior to love. This is entirely intelligible to a Roman-law mindset, but does not reflect the mystery of self-giving love which is the end light of revelation.
4. Compassion and solidarity are the core anthropology of biblical revelation. Solidarity is not the same as state socialism which may be seen as a vertical force. Solidarity is an upwelling of unity with other people "from below" and realizes a higher (more human) form of freedom. Solidarity is inherently democratic and seeks to enshrine itself in policy for the sake of a transformed earth.
5. Our after-death destiny is understood as an earth-based "sleep" which is a survival of our basic identity in communion with Christ. It is perhaps a kind of "cosmic life support" which is not full consciousness, but neither is it extinction. At all events it looks toward the restoration of full bodily existence in Resurrection which is the true New Testament goal (rather than "immortality of the soul").
Tony Bartlett TinR Theology & Peace
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