I suppose, without great intentionality, that I read according to Ricoeur’s nice pairing of “suspicion and retrieval.” The “suspicion” is an awareness that every text and every reading, including my own, is laden with ideological interest. This is true of skeptics, minimalists, and fideists of all kinds. The “retrieval” is to see what may be said after one has done rigorous criticism. What one finds, after criticism, is that there is still this character “God,” who continues to haunt and evoke and summon and address. No sort of criticism, so it seems to me, finally disposes of that character. Now it may be that the character is an act of literary imagination; or it may be that the character is indeed an agent who is in, with, and under the text. Either way, one cannot dispose of that character. I find myself moving back and forth between a literary character and an active agent. Either way, that character haunts and causes everything to be redefined. But being haunted by this character is not just a confessional act for “believers.” I believe the best exposition of this testimony for “non-believers” is by Terry Eagleton in his Terry Lectures at Yale. Eagleton is not a “believer,” but he takes seriously the claims of this text that are more than “literary.” Eagleton shows that the claims are not merely cognitive and so readily dismissed by “silly atheists.” Rather, Eagleton sees that the claims of the tradition are that this holy character is linked to the valuing of “the scum” of the earth. The point is a practical one, not an intellectual one.

--Walter Brueggemann

link/ht

I speak as a Christian- one whose commitment to democracy is very deep but whose Christian convictions are deeper. Democracy is not my faith. And American democracy is not my idol. To see the gospel of Jesus Christ bastardized by imperial Christians and pulverized by Constantinian believers and then exploited by nihilistic elites of the American empire makes my blood boil. To be a Christian- a follower of Jesus Christ- is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. This is the radical love in Christian freedom and the radical freedom in Christian love that embraces socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope.

If Christians do not exemplify this love and freedom, then we side with the nihilists of the Roman empire (cowardly elite Romans and subjugated Jews) who put Jesus to a humiliating death. Instead of receiving his love in freedom as a life-enhancing gift of grace, we end up believing in the idols of the empire that nailed him to the cross. I do not want to be numbered among those who sold their souls for a mess of pottage- who surrendered their democratic Christian identity for a comfortable place at the table of the American empire while, like Lazarus, the least of these cried out and I was too intoxicated with worldly power and might to hear, beckon, and heed their cries.

To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely- to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic Christian identity in the age of the American empire.

-- Cornel West

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[W]ithin a large-scale setting, where the other lives at a distance, indifference can be more deadly than hate.  Whereas the fire of hatred flares up in the proximity of the other and then dies down, the cold indifference can be sustained over time, especially in contemporary socieites.  A "system" -- a political, economic, or cultural system -- insinuates itself between myself and the other.  If the other is excluded, it is the system that is doing the excluding, a system in which I participate because I must survive and against which I do not rebel because it cannot be changed.  I turn my eyes away (or I zoom in with a camera at some exotic exemplar of suffering, which amounts to turning the eyes away because it both satisfies my perverse desire to see suffering and appeases my conscience for having turned the heart away from the sufferer).  I go about my own business.  Numbed by the apparent ineluctability of exclusion taking place outside my will though with my colloboration, I start to view horror and my implication in it as normalcy.  I reason: the road from Jersusalem to Jericho will always be littered by people beaten and left half-dead; I can pass -- must pass -- by each without much concern.  The indifference that made the prophect, takes care also of its fulfillment.

-- Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, pg. 77

In the capitalist system, under which we all suffer, everything is centered upon the individual and individual development. There is no essential regard for others or for society. Goods are privately appropriated, to the exclusion of ownership on the part of the vast majority of persons. Individual differences are valued to the detriment of communion. The socialist system, for its part, emphasizes universal participation, which, as far as the ideal is concerned, more nearly resembles the trinitarian dynamic. But personal differences mean little here. Socialist society tends to constitute a mass rather than a people, because a people is the fruit of a whole network of communities and associations in which persons count. The trinitarian mystery invites us to adopt social forms that value all relations among persons and institutions and foster an egalitarian, familial community in which differences will be positively welcomed. As the Christians of the base church communities have formulated it: The holy Trinity is the best community.

--Leonardo Boff, Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, p. 85

"Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture. The scandal of the New Testament—the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois—all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version. I’m presently at a university campus where we proudly proclaim the slogan “God, Country, and Notre Dame.” I think they have to be told, and indeed I have told them, that God actually takes little interest in countries. Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way. He slips out of your grasp if you try to do so. His concern is with universal humanity, not with one particular section of it. Such ideologies make it very hard to get a traditional version of Christianity across.

I think, actually, [Richard Dawkins is] a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place! That would be rather like Madonna calling herself post-Marxist. You’d have to read him first to be post-him. As I’ve said before, I think that Dawkins in particular makes such crass mistakes about the kind of claims that Christianity is making. A lot of the time, he’s either banging at an open door or he’s shooting at a straw target."

--Terry Eagleton

(via) (ht inhabitatio dei)

"Every consistent theological summing up, every theological system lays claim to totality, perfect organization, and entire competence for the whole area under survey.  In principle one has to be able to say everything, and not to leave any point unconsidered.  All the statements must fit in with one another without contradiction, and the whole architecture must be harmonious, an integrated whole.  Every theoretical system, even a theologial one, has therefore an aesthetic charm, at least to some degree.  But this allurement can also be a dangerous seduction.  Systems save some readers (and their admirers most of all) from thinking critically for themselves and from arriving at independent and responsible decision.  For systems do not present themselves for discussion.  For that reason I have resisted the temptation to develop a theological system, even an 'open' one.

The common, tried and tested view of what dogmatics is also made me hesitate.  In the political language of the Emperor Augustus, dogma meant 'decree.'  A decree is not supposed to be critically questioned; above all we are not supposed to reject it.  The decree is imposed by force if necessary.  Of course the theological concept of dogma is far removed from all this.  But even here there is the odour -- and often enough the attitude -- of a judgment which is final and no longer open to appeal.  Even if it is not 'dogmatic' in our everyday sense of the word, dogmatic thinking in theology likes to express itself in theses; not in theses for discussion, but in theses that are simply promulgated, which evoke agreement or rejection, but not independent thinking and responsible decision.  They enfore thier own ideas on the listener; they do not help him form his own.

[...]

Behind all this is the conviction that, humanly speaking, truth is to be found in unhindered dialogue.  Fellowship and freedom are the human components for knowledge of the truth, the truth of God.  And the fellowship I mean here is the fellowship of mutual participation and unifying sympathy.  What is meant is the right to the libery of one's own personal conviction and one's own free assent.  This free community of men and women, without privilege and without discrimination, may be termed the earthly body of truth.  And this of course means that the converse is true as well: that only truth can be the sould of a free community of men and women like this.  Theological systems and assertive dogmatics can hardly bring out this aspect of truth.  They exert coercion where free assent can be expceted and given.  The leave the indidivdual mind litt room for creative fantasy.  The allow no time for individual decisions.  But it is only in free dialogue that truth can be accepted for the only right and proper reason -- namely, that is illuminates and convinces as truth.  Truth beings about assent, it brings about change without exerting complusion.  In dialogue the truth frees men and women for their own conceptions and their own ideas.  In liberating dialogue teachers withdraw into the circle of sisters and brothers.  The pupil becomes the friend.  Christian theology would wither and die if it were not bound up with a fellowship that seeks dialogue, needs it and continually pursues it."

--Jürgen Moltmann in the preface to The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, xi-xiii.