The Authentic Church Cannot Be An Adjunct To Gangsterism - Last Questions And Answers In This Series

THE NEXT QUESTION, as well, was obscured but, based on the answer I think it was about what was going to happen to  the Church in the predatory economy.

Well, the Church is being kicked out of Egypt so we're going to find out.   It means to abandon our notions of establishment and entitlement and privilege.  I don't want to be dramatic but as von Aber(?) said, "to become poor men and women after the poor Jesus."  And we are, us institutional types are ill-equipped to do that.  But that's what's going to happen.   And institutional types regard that as a great misfortune.  It might be the best thing that could happen to the Church.  Which means we got to sell all these big buildings to someone else and so on and so on.   
 
At Andersen where I worship, about two years ago it's like all at once everybody decided to quit going to church.  It's happening.  And I think for the institutional Church that's the chickens coming home to roost for the way we've ordered our life.  And it doesn't feel very good.

It didn't feel very good when they left Egypt.  They're two verses into the wilderness and they want to go back.  And they say to Moses, "you brought us out here to die."  

So the power of Pharaoh keeps pulling us . . . It's like [characters in] these movies who try to leave the Mafia and you can't get out.   You can't get out of Egypt but you have to go.  

Then the man who I assume is Peter said: You know it's happening.  I don't know if you know Rich at Emmanuel Presbyterian.   So he's decided to talk to the Church and [they decided] to take some of the money out of their endowment - most people think the purpose of the endowment is [to watch the endowment and keep it large] -  and invested it in a neighborhood cooperative food market.  That is a huge step out of [Egypt?].  

I've filled in with what I think I may have discerned on the recording but am not fully confident I got the words right.  What is in square brackets is my assumption of the meaning of what I couldn't hear.  

Which suggests a good example of how to start leaving the predatory economy in which an endowment is more important than the least among us.  As they said, it's happening, taking a chance on giving food in a modern urban food desert.  Jesus told People to sell everything they have and give the money to the poor and follow him.   I know of one church building around here which was abandoned - along with its congregation - by the Catholic dioceses of Maine.   The building was sold and bought by an activist, semi-moderate, for Baptists congregation which turned it into pretty much a social service entity as well as a place with Sunday services.  That hadn't been absent in the previous Church but it was clearly ineffectively weak on that.  Such things had more theoretically been encouraged but the US Catholic Conference of Bishops has been far more caught up in squabbles about issues like LGBTQ+ clergy and same-sex marriage, not to mention the priest-pedophile scandal.  The Baptists there now seem to ignore issues like marriage equality,  I have the feeling they won't be a "welcoming church" in that regard - which, as a member of the LGBTQ+ community I certainly don't agree with of find just - but they feed People and provide them with some other services.  The same is true for the UCC Church in the next town over, though even with that their congregation is certainly petering out through the indifference of younger people.  Which I find pretty hard to take but I haven't joined them, either.  Most of those Catholics I know who were members of the parish obliterated by one of JPII's bishops have stopped going to church.  If mainline Protestantism is in danger from the indifference of its members Catholics are even more so from the clerics who hold all of the power.  

I think Christianity is going to be sorely missed if the more pessimistic view turns out to be true.  Certainly missed by those who need to be served by it, though they don't seem to join enough to keep it going.  I think the problem is that the popular culture and, to a far less powerful extent in terms of actual influence, academic orthodoxy is all in with the gangster (Pharaonic) regime.  I can't resist pointing out that given my usual identity of most governments with gangster rule, I take it as confirmation of my theory that someone as wise and insightful as Walter Brueggemann compared those to the Mafia.

This all reminds me of Karl Rahner's prediction that Christianity of the future would be a "winter" Christianity without the elaborate, florid growth of institutions and culture of the past.* If those old elaborations were replaced by what Brueggemann and others are talking about as the Gospel, Law and Prophetic action I think it would probably be the best thing that could happen to it, though I'd certainly miss the great organs and choirs which are a part of that old institutional church.  I don't think those were at all entirely superfluous to attracting People to church where they could be encouraged to stand up against Pharaoh.  We are, after all, up against a system which gains its influence by attracting the greatest number of eyes and ears.  

I am confident that the "spiritual but not religious" substitute is not going to be any kind of replacement, neither will American style Buddhism or "mindfulness," though that seems to be fading in fashion.   What is needed is the opposite of what I imagined when I first read about Rahner's prediction which, I realized in writing this, was like the secret Christianity under communist governance or like the secret Jews from the time of the expulsion and forced conversion in Spain which reportedly survives even in Latin America.  Such a private, quietistic Christianity under indifference instead of oppression would be the worst thing that could happen because then there would then be no reason for Christianity to survive.  


Another inaudible question followed but it was about The Lord's Prayer, whether the line should be "forgive us our debts (as we forgive our debtors),"  as opposed to "forgive us our trespasses."  which is certainly a directly relevant question considering the topic of the lecture is a predatory economy.  Walter Brueggemann's answer was:

Presbyterians - I'm a Calvinist.  [The question was] in The Lord's Prayer do we say "Forgive us our trespasses," or "Forgive us our debts."  

I'm a Calvinist, Presbyterians would rather have their debts forgiven than their sins.  [laughter] Isn't that right? [laughter] But, you see, you can also do "trespasses" and you could think about how the predatory economy trespasses on the life of vulnerable People.  So you can do it either way.  The new translation is "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,"  the problem with that is "sin"  is a terribly misunderstood word in the Church.  And that's probably not very helpful either.  

I follow the French Catholic translation and say "Forgive us our wrongs" though I alternate with all of the above, too.  As an Irish Catholic I might not be able to define sin but I believe I know it when I do it and am far more confident about my ability to know it when someone does it to me.

The last question seems to have asked if there was a just economy anywhere in the world.  

Well, I think that you'd have to think in terms of,  not in terms of absolutes but in terms of relative arrangements and some neighborhoods are currently more that way than other neighborhoods.  I guess that if one were to talk about national economies one would probably talk about the Scandinavian economies but I don't know much about that.

I think there are gestures in neighborhoods that make those efforts.  But not absolutely so.  Well, if it's in terms of nations I would think those Scandinavian countries come close to it but the problem is all of those models for us is no other nation in the West has a history of slavery.  And the history of slavery has wounded all of our possibilities in that regard. Which makes it so much more difficult and so much more complex here.  That's what I think.  

While it isn't true that other countries in the West don't have some history of slavery in virtually no other country with a written Constitution which still governs its ruling structures and institutions was slavery so deeply embedded into what remains as the current Constitution.

The features of it supporting slavery still fully active to accomplish those goals, even with the alleged emancipation of slaves pasted onto that slave-market edifice.  The cultural remains and habits of such a deeply evil thing in a country remains for many generations but when the legal support for that evil is not expunged it probably takes many more generations than it would have and I think it never is defeated until those constitutional and legal and judicial supports for slavery are abolished in fact as well as in mere legal notions.  

I think it is one of the worst things about the Constitution that we still have, for all intents and purposes, including the unjust stealing of labor and the results of labor and wealth by the wealthy, the same Constitution, especially as most of the Supreme Courts have twisted it to mean, has given us most of our worst problems and we are still required to worship it and its writers.  America is founded in that kind of idolatry.  And it is entirely a secular idolatry.  The modern "white evangelical" deification of the founders, the Constitution, the various myths of the South, West, Mid-West, etc is decisive proof that it is as saturated with a particular modern, Hollywood fed paganism as admittedly secular gangsterism is.  And so is the secular academy and, far more so, media.  

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I think that this short lecture and question session is one of the most important ones I've heard in a while.  I could mention that something of an extended version of it was given in Walter Brueggemann's Willard Lecture which can also be heard, though I'm not up to transcribing an hour and a half, these days.  

He is almost certainly right that once it leaves our modern, Western, secular Egypt, better days for the Christian Church may be ahead for us but it won't come in the same old wine-skins.  I am beginning to think the same about the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement and Intentional Eucharistic Community movement as opposed to the official Catholic Church, though Francis seems to me to be making the path for progress straight for whoever comes later.  I certainly don't think better days for Christianity can come in trying to claw back a time which has about run its course.  The same is true for American democracy though it's probably a lot less likely to survive, it certainly won't without those kind of changes I talked about above.

I'm also so grateful for Walter Brueggemann, his work, his continuing witness and testimony and the generous abundance of his writing and speaking available to us.  I can honestly say he's had such an important impact on my life this past number of years and I hope he has on others.  I have no doubt that his work will help guide Christians for generations to come.  


* Elizabeth A. Johnson described the situation of Christianity in "winter" as consisely as anyone I've read, including Rahner.

A winter season: such is Rahner's metaphor for the situation of faith in the modern world.  Keeping his eye on middle-class educated European persons who are trying live a Christian life, he sees that this is a world  that no longer easily communicates the faith.  First off, a person can no longer be a Christian out of social convention or inherited custom.  To be a Christian now requires a personal decision that brings about a change of heart and sustains long-term commitment.  Not cultural Christianity but a diaspora church, scattered among unbelievers and believers of various stripes becomes the setting for this free act of faith.  Furthermore when a person does come to engage belief in a personal way, society makes this difficult to do.  For modern society is marked not only by atheism and agnosticism but also by pessimism, which restricts what we can know to data accessible from the natural sciences,; secularism, which gets on with the business at hand, impatient of ultimate questions, with a wealth of humanistic values that allow a life of ethical integrity without faith;  and religious pluralism, which demonstrates that there is more than one path to holy and ethical living.  All of these call into question the very validity of Christian belief.  

I think that Johnson's optimistic view of secular "humanism" and ethics is as unrealistically optimistic as the traditional view of what comes out of easy, socially conventional or inherited Christianity.  I think the most frequent outcome of such secular ethics is at least as vulnerable to fading, within an individual, personal life but certainly in a family history is that it fades rather faster than much of genuine Christianity.  Even when it does continue to go through the motions.  So I don't buy that it is something that a community and ever more so a country can depend on to maintain what is needed to keep out of the clutches of Pharaonic gangsterism translated to modern life.  Marxism faded to gangsterism much faster than The Law did for the Children of Israel, they managed to avoid rule by a king for a long time, and even then it was no paradise on Earth.  The fading of modern Israeli democracy for Likud coalition fascism is another example of that.  

But that is what Christianity is up against and, I am ever more convinced the perils of the attempt to live authentic Christianity in community and the peril that American democracy faces are precisely intertwined.   Egalitarian democracy EVERYWHERE is dependent on the moral content of Golden Rule equality and the practice of that, in turn, depends on a belief that God has constructed human life in that way.  I agree with Brueggemann that in the context of the United States, it is dependent on the rejection of our indigenous form of fascism (gangsterism), white supremacy.  I recall that when he visited the United States the Lutheran martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer found authentic Christianity in the Black Church and not in the white Churches and seminary.  As he noted "only a suffering God can help."   You don't find a suffering God in easy, cultural Christianity or in any kind of secularism or humanism.  Ironically, the hope that comes along with the crucified Jesus is an antidote to the pessimism of secular modern paganism with its material gods because on the third day he rose from the dead into new life.  See Also:  James Cone, The Cross And The Lynching Tree.  

I'll end this with this from the Staple Singers: