The crucifixion,then, is not an odd event in the history of faith, although it is the decisive event. It is, rather, the full expression of dismantling that has been practiced and insisted upon in the prophetic tradition since Moses confronted Pharaoh. As with Moses, so Jesus' ministry and death opposed the politics of oppression with the politics of justice and compassion. As with Moses, so Jesus' ministry and death resisted the economics of affluence and called for the economics of shared humanity. As with Moses, so Jesus' ministry and death contradicted the religion of God's captivity with the freedom of God to bring life where he will, even in the face of death.
The cross is the ultimate metaphor of prophetic criticism because it means the end of the old consciousness that brings death on everyone. The crucifixion articulates God's odd freedom, his strange justice, and his peculiar power. It is this freedom (read religion of God's freedom), justice (read economics of sharing), power (read politics of justice) which break the power of the old age and bring it to death. Without the cross prophetic imagination will likely be as strident and destructive as that which it criticizes. The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.
You wonder if this paragraph might not hold the key to the scandalous history of nominal Christianity with power of exactly the kind that Pharaoh personified, what Christianity became when it was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire and other governments and theologians started the process of taming Christianity to make it harmless to the rich and powerful. That it was the cross, the willingness to die to practice "God's freedom," "economics of sharing," and "politics of justice." You might compare the French Republican slogan of "liberty, equality and fraternity" and look at what happened far faster in that self-conscious age of "reason" and "enlightenment" as the various factions of "brothers" got power and immediately used it to kill their rival comrades and the worse to come under Napoleon's and his successors violent, turbulent regimes in the next century. Or, the United States and its slave and genocide republic or the Russian, Chinese Revolutions, etc. self-consciously scientific revolutions for which the culture of the Enlightenment "enlightened" have yet to be called to nearly as full account.
Certainly, even more influential has been the attack on religion by the entertainment industry, writers and performers who want to be considered in the know (most of them are quite ignorant) aimed at making Judaism into a joke and Christianity a tacky, hypocritical entity which is absurd, to blame for everything and opposed to everything good in the commercial sense that comodified "good" has come to mean for most Americans. The culture of show biz has left those it keeps in ignorance through eating up most of their days with entertainment when they could be learning something real with the vague sense that Christianity is unfashionable and tacky - it doesn't help that so many nominal Christians do so much to help in the effort - and that if they so much as really look into it, it'll give them cooties. It is always a mistake to consider that the world of accurate thinking and study and writing have much to do with the lives of the large majority of people whose real educators are TV, other broadcast and cabloid media and, God save us, the internet. Compared to those the entire educational apparatus is totally ineffective, except in so far as it, also, has promoted that discrediting of religion.
As Brueggemann points out, in so far as they wanted to claim Jesus as their inspiration, the Christian establishment totally blew by the Gospels and Epistles. The extent to which the modern Pharaonic regimes have blown by reason and the consequences of materialism would be far harder to tease out, any alleged moral content not being something science is required to deal with. The religious ferment of the 16th and 17th centuries may have given rise to the reaction of the "Enlightenment," the "Enlightenment" has given rise to the anti-intellectualism and moral decay of consumer capitalism and, under the most self-consciously scientific regimes, nothing more than state capitalism and the brainlessness of entertainment culture. That, as much as anything, is the consciousness, or unconsciousness, that has to be attacked now.
Prophetic criticism aims to create an alternative consciousness with its own rhetoric and field of perception. That alternative consciousness, unless the criticism is to be superficial and external, has to do with the cross. Douglas Hall has explored how we might think about this, suggesting that creative criticism must be ethically pertinent and premised on our own embrace of negativity. The kind of prophetic criticism does not lightly offer alternatives, does not mouth assurances, and does not provide redemptive social policy. It knows that only those who mourn can be comforted and so it first asks about how to mourn seriously and faithfully for the world passing away. Jesus understood and embodied that anguish which Jeremiah felt so poignantly.
Last year, as the KGB man, Putin, invaded Ukraine the Orthodox intellectual, philosopher and theologian David Bently Hart gave a very pessimistic lecture about the future of Christianity. I think if you started with the view that nominal Christianity may well be going into eclipse as it seems to lose the struggle with secularism his pessimism is spot on. But I think Christianity has, in reality, always been in an eclipse since Constantine. I've never been that impressed with nominal Christianity because those Christians don't seem to have much to do with Jesus, James, Paul or the largely unknown authors of the rest of the New Testament. I would include much if not most of evangelical and Catholic and Orthodox (look at Kyril, the Patriarch of Moscow, just now) Christianity in that critique though all of those large groups have always had those who tried to follow Jesus, even those who rather clearly took up a cross to do it. I think Francis is trying to move Catholicism into being more Christian as Vatican II started under John XXIII of blessed memory. But they have also included the shadow on The Light for the entire time. The preface to John's Gospel is something I've come to appreciate a lot more this past year, for all of the baggage the whole book has had placed on it.
I don't know what the future holds for Christianity as a major force in Western culture, though I do know it has endured even in the face of modernity to some extent. It endured the corruptions of many a Pope, many a bishop, many a movement. The great civil rights movement of the period of Martin Luther King jr. came out of what was largely a conservative evangelical tradition, it is certainly proof of the durability of Christianity. There have been many, many smaller examples of it, often leading the the martyrdom which our St. Martin suffered. I think right now the worst enemies Christianity has are probably internal, Catholic neo-integralism (listen to DBH's horrific example from Harvard Law School at the link above), Protestant fundamentalism, Orthodox nationalism, sterile academics biblical experts and theologians. All of whom discredit Christianity. But none so much as those who oppose the economics of sharing and the politics of justice, who, in the United States and elsewhere where the heresy of "Christian nationalism" is rampant.
I have been deeply pessimistic since Putin invaded Ukraine and the Republican-fascists, the "religious rights" liars, on the Supreme Court here have placed women under the subjugation of state legislatures and governors in Republican-fascist dominated states, the ongoing slaughter by mass murdering gun nuts the Supreme Court and Republican-fascists enable, etc. They certainly do more to discredit Christianity than the fading snark of the new atheists who flourished in teh 00's.
Those are the reasons I haven't felt much like posting music or radio dramas. But it's not in my nature to give in to pessimism for long. As the historian Howard Zinn said in his wonderful 1990 essay "Failure to Quit,"
I can understand pessimism, but I don't believe in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don't need certaintly, only possibility. Despite all those confident statements that "history shows. . ." and "history proves. . .," hope is all the past can offer us.
It occurs to me that is what the Gospel accounts, the professions of Paul and Acts, concerning the Resurrection are to most people who first look at them or look at them seriously for the first time "not overwhelming evidence," they are words on a page, if you choose not to be inclined to seriously consider them. If they choose to take them seriously they are "just enough to give hope." If we read it expecting "certainty" it's unlikely we'll really get to belief in the possibility of it.* I'd say they are the beginning of choosing to believe.
I have listened to the arguments, some of them rather good in the way that you can make good arguments for anything in the evidence of history from that period, of the apologists for historicity of the Resurrection, certainly as strongly attested in the record when compared to anything else known about early 1st century history.
But in the end it's on me, I have to choose to believe or choose to disbelieve. I choose to believe now after I suspended belief for a long time. It is impossible for me to conceive of believing without the experience of life as an LGBTQ+ person reacting to the oppression of both church and state, witness to the aftermath of WWII and the knowledge of the scientific regimes genocides, the discrediting of Marxism through its catastrophic and criminal test of time, my disillusionment with the secular left and secularism, in general, the great civil rights struggles, the martyrdom of so many in Central and South America under U.S. foreign policy. . . But also witness to genuine Christian belief and action. The involvement of my mother with Pax Christi and other groups, the Martyrs of Central America, many local and others who give witness to the teacings of Jesus among the least among us. I don't think I could have chosen to believe, finally, without that experience. And, especially in the period when I could go online and check the primary documentation of materialist, atheist, scientism and secular (read anti-religious, anti-Christian) culture, I found that one after another most of the totems and idols and myths of secularism were just that, self-apparent myths documented to be so in the far more complete recent documentary record. It was a long road.
I think the future of the possibility of a decent life under egalitarian democracy, probably the continuation of the human species and life on Earth depend on enough people to REALLY believe it for the first time. I also choose to believe that the best days of Christianity are in the future, not in the past, that much of the past and present of Christianity will not be a part of it. I don't think that "just war" theory will be. That trio of values Walter Brueggemann set out certainly must be. I choose to believe that when Jesus told his followers to pray, "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven," he was telling them to pray for AND TO PERFORM that so as to make Earth as heavenly as it can be. I don't think he'd have told them to do that if it were an impossibility or even next to impossible. I do believe The Meek will inherit the Earth. They won't get much support from the secular left or Hollywood or academia, they won't get it from "Christian" media, the putrid EWTN or the secular media. They certainly won't get it from most of the powers that be anywhere, left or right. It won't come from that kind of power.
* I won't go into it again having done so recently but the idea that there is much of anything that has that level of certainty in what we choose to believe we know about much of anything is a delusion of scientistic materialism.
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