This is an adaptation of the ninth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.
Content warning — we are going to be talking about violence; and I am going to touch on the way that violence is gendered, especially around family violence, and I do not want that to take people by surprise.
If I asked you to describe the stories you have been consuming lately in a sentence, how would you do it?
Here are a few of mine:
An elite soldier’s unit and family are killed as a result of a deep state conspiracy involving the military and big pharma, so he goes on a rampage, killing everyone involved.
Or…
A retired military police officer hitchhikes around the U.S. and manages to stumble into a deadly conspiracy; he uses his investigative skills and capacity for violence to solve it.
Or… and this one was a favourite… A folk-singing spy with PTSD, whose father works for the CIA, is sent undercover in an engineering firm so he can prevent the election of a pro-nuclear Iranian presidential candidate, or failing that, assassinate him; he sings his way through his trauma and questions about the cost of participating in violence.
At the time of preaching this series, Amazon had just launched the new Rings of Power Tolkien epic, which is fascinating because Tolkien thought very carefully about stories and their power — and about technology and the way it changes us.
In a letter about Middle Earth he explains that magic in his world — especially the destructive magic of Mordor — was a picture of the machine in ours.
“He will rebel against the laws of the Creator — especially against mortality. Both of these will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective — and so to the Machine (or magic).”
— Tolkien
The machine is operating through:
“… all use of external plans or devices instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents — or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.”
He sees this as the operations of “the enemy” — who he calls the “Lord of Magic and machines.” He says:
“The enemy in successive forms is always ‘naturally’ concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines.”
This created stuff warps us — like the One Ring warped Gollum — and anyone who wields it, and perhaps like swords and weapons shaped those who wield them; coming with a cost — the sort that get explored through the violent battle for Middle Earth.
The thing about stories is that they are powerful; they shape our understanding of the world — they shape our imaginations and desires, just like images — stories are part of what Charles Taylor, and Jamie Smith (who was the guy who wrote You Are What You Love), call the social imaginary — the background to our beliefs; the stuff that shapes our imagination.
“A social imaginary is not how we think about the world, but how we imagine the world before we ever think about it… it is made up of, and embedded in, stories, narratives, myths and icons.”
— James K.A. Smith
It is not just architecture and images that shape us — stories do as well. They help us make sense of the world; stories are what help us figure out what data we receive as “truth,” and what we do not.
“These visions capture our hearts and imaginations by ‘lining’ our imagination, as it were, providing us with frameworks of ‘meaning’ by which we make sense of our world and our calling in it.”
You could argue that telling stories — whether it is history, or fiction, or the myths — the big stories we live by — is part of being made in the image of the God who has structured history, and his word, as a story; that one of the things that separates us from other living creatures is that we tell stories — you do not see koalas building libraries.
Stories also shape the way we live — they teach us how we should live. There is a philosopher, Alisdair MacIntyre, who reckons the modern world has become a bureaucratic machine, where asking “how should I live?” gets reframed as “what is the most efficient way to make things happen.” He reckons the way out of the machine is to recognise the place of story in our lives, and in cultivating virtue; and that we can only know how we ought to live in this world if we can understand ourselves living in a story — knowing our origins, our beginning, our setting, and our destination — and who we need to be to get there.
“I can only answer the question ‘what am I to do?’ If I can answer the prior question: ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
— Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
The “machine” means we often treat “non-fiction” — facts — as more important than stories, but this is making the mistake of treating us more like robots than humans; we live and breathe stories.
We spent some time previously unpacking Israel’s origin story — the creation story in Genesis — and imagining how it shaped the life of God’s people, not only living as God’s priestly image-bearing people in the Eden-like promised land, looking after the temple —
but imagining how that story might have shaped Israel to live differently in Babylon, where life was defined by an altogether different story — we dug into it a bit — the Enuma Elish — the story of the gods of Babylon creating the world through violence, from the bodies of dead and defeated gods.
Last week we talked about the powers and principalities that the New Testament describes operating to keep us captive; these spiritual powers are the animating forces behind the systems that make us less than human as we get swept up in them so that we are imprinted by them to represent those powers; to live, so to speak, as characters in their stories (Ephesians 6:11-12). In Babylon the powers operated through an idolatrous regime that celebrated violence.
Walter Wink was a Pentecostal theologian — he wrote a book called The Powers That Be about these systems that we can observe in the world. He was probably less inclined to see spiritual beings pulling the strings behind these observations, and more inclined to see collective human rebellion against God — but he talks about how the same story that animated Babylon, through its creation story — the idea that killing is in our genes; that to be human is to fight against evil, to destroy enemies, with violence — animates the empires of the modern West. He says of the way this story permeates our imaginary:
“The implications are clear: human beings are created from the blood of a murdered god. Our very origin story is violence. Killing is in our genes.”
— Walter Wink
It is this story, that he calls the myth of redemptive violence — the idea that whatever the problems we face, at the end of the day victory will take violence — heroic standing up against the forces of evil and triumphing, throwing them back into the abyss while wielding a sword.
“This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.”
— Walter Wink
It is this story, not the Gospel, that shapes the politics of a post-Christendom world; and is the dominant religious story in our world; it is behind how we “imagine” the world before fleshing it out.
“By making violence pleasurable, fascinating and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.”
It is the myth you will find making violence entertaining — in The Terminal List, and Reacher — and even in Rings of Power — deluding people into compliance with a deadly and dehumanising system. Our stories are a little more complex — all these stories are critiquing violent conspiracies and evil, even embodied in a deep state — but they are offering violent solutions, even if, like in Patriot and Middle Earth, the stories leave us asking questions about the cost of wielding the sword. These powers — idol machines — do not just use one story, but this myth of redemptive violence is built into our world, and it is destructive.
Wink reckons there is more going on under the hood in our entertainment, the stories we consume, than we realise. He says in this story politics becomes ultimate; the state and its armed forces are responsible for throwing chaos into the abyss, and those who buy the story will offer themselves up for holy war.
“Salvation is politics: the masses identify with the god of order against the god of chaos, and offer themselves up for the Holy War that imposes order and rule on the peoples round about. Peace through war; security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the domination system is found in every society.”
This myth props up what the former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex as he left office in 1961. We talked about this back in our Revelation series.
He was worried about the rapid development of an arms industry as a product of the Cold War. He said American factories once made ploughs, but they had learned to make swords, in a permanent industry of vast proportions designed to supply the armed forces.
“American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions…”
— Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961
He reckoned people had to be really careful about the way people making money from this industry would chase power and influence, because it had the potential to change the economic, political, and spiritual makeup of the country.
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”
And this seems a world away from us, here in a small church in a city across the world, but the degrees of separation might be smaller than you think. Our military industrial complex is a lot smaller than the U.S. We look at their gun culture as an idol, while consuming the same stories that justify those cultural norms — the same stories that prop up this idea that nations solve problems with violence — and these stories also prop up the idea that individuals should use violence to solve problems, and especially that men should; they shape how we understand masculinity.
Did you notice that the three shows I started out talking about all have violent men as heroes? There is a certain view of the world that sees masculinity as being about male power — the capacity for violence — so they can be protectors, and so women can swoon over such masculine men.
It is not just our entertainment — so much of our Christian content, the books we read, the stuff we listen to or watch, comes from the U.S. And the church in the U.S. has shown itself, in the last few years, to be marching in lockstep with the dominion system. This same myth of redemptive violence is used to justify grabbing hold of political power to win a culture war, or any sort of conflict against your enemies.
There is a writer in the States, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, who wrote this book Jesus and John Wayne, exploring how this same myth has embedded itself in the church.
We are products of our culture; of what we consume, she says:
“The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit.”
She traces the way that the modern church has developed a sort of “militant masculinity” — idolising power and the capacity for violence, militant heroes like the western star John Wayne.
“For many evangelicals, these militant heroes would come to define not only Christian manhood but Christianity itself… Wayne modelled masculine strength, aggression, and redemptive violence… Little separated Jesus from John Wayne. Jesus had become a Warrior Leader, an Ultimate Fighter.”
This is a picture of our “social imaginary” preconditioning us to read the Gospel stories in a particular way that is more Babylonian than Biblical.
She has the receipts — she quotes a guy named Doug Wilson, who, thanks to the Internet, enjoys a pretty wide readership in Australia. In one of his books, Wilson says it is essential for boys to play with swords and guns; to meet a deep need to have something to defend, something to represent in battle. You might have heard stories like this; that there is this inbuilt capacity for violence that is necessary in case you have to save someone.
“… it is absolutely essential for boys to play with wooden swords and plastic guns. Boys have a deep need to have something to defend, something to represent in battle.”
— Doug Wilson
Note: since preaching this series in 2022, Wilson’s infamy and influence has increased and in a recent “no quarter November” he was selling branded flamethrowers.
For Wilson, to beat our weapons into pruning hooks too soon — to not be part of the military-industrial complex and buying the myth of redemptive violence — that will leave us fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.
“And to beat the spears into pruning hooks prematurely, before the war is over, will leave you fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.”
— Doug Wilson
Like Eisenhower, he has this passage from Isaiah in mind — where God will bring restoration and a transformed world, replacing war, violence, with peace, so that instead of making weapons people will make farming tools, pruning hooks and ploughshares.
“He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”
— Isaiah 2:4
Folks like Wilson do not think that day of the Lord has come yet. For them we should still be armed and dangerous, with the weapons of the world.
Du Mez also points out just how angry Wilson got at the idea women might be warriors, for a bunch of reasons including that they are not as good at the “important work of violence.” Now, you have probably got your own thoughts about women becoming soldiers, but that is not the point. When you make the enemy someone who can be stabbed, you rob women of their place in the battle against the powers.
“… they were a sexual distraction to male soldiers, they could get pregnant, they distorted ‘covenantal lines of authority,’ and they were not as good as men in ‘the important work of violence.’”
When Eve is created as Adam’s helper (Genesis 2:18), it is the word ezer; a word with military connotations — more like ally — that is used of God throughout the Bible. Ultimately this myth of redemptive violence, that wants men wielding swords and fighting people, is the myth of redemptive patriarchy; a myth of redemptive male violence.
It is a myth built on the cursed pattern of relationships in Genesis 3 where “he” rules over “her” — not where they rule together and she is an ally in the cause. And we do have a problem with the myth of redemptive patriarchy and male entitlement through power here in Australia. It is expressed in the rate of family violence perpetrated by men in our country, and the soaring numbers of sexual assaults perpetrated by boys in our schools. This does not come from nowhere; it is supported by narratives that paint heroism as using power to make the world what you think it should be. Domination, rather than the sort of dominion we were made for, is built into our lives at a societal level, and an individual level.
I am not sure these folks going on about taking up the sword, with a vision of masculinity that sees an inherent capacity for violence, have read their Bibles, where our enemy is not flesh and blood, but the devil, and his schemes, these powers, spiritual forces (Ephesians 6:11-12) — a real gun is not going to be much more useful than a toy one at this point.
And the “armour of God” we use in this fight — it is not armour geared towards violence; the sword in this war is the word of God; get your kids to play with it. And the way of life that prepares us for this fight is not playing with guns, it is prayer (Ephesians 6:17-18).
Plus, even though our enemy is the dragon-serpent — if we take up the sword and respond with violence, the story of the Bible seems to be that we defeat ourselves and choose his side — and the victory over the dragon comes through non-violent redemptive sacrifice.
Satan enters the scene as some sort of legged serpent, a dragon (Genesis 3). And then, when Cain is angry at Abel, God says sin is crouching at the door — like some personified wild animal, a power, desiring to have him (Genesis 4:7). And when he gives in to that power, he gets violent; he kills his brother (Genesis 4:8). This is a thread we traced through Genesis; to Nimrod, the violent killer who built Babylon and Assyria (Genesis 10:9-12).
The temptation Satan offers through the powers is the same one he offers Jesus in the wilderness — as we saw in Matthew — the temptation to grab hold of the kingdoms of the world with power (Matthew 4:8-9); to play the Babylon game; to run a domination system, or enjoy its rewards. To bow down to the dragon and serve his kingdom, embracing his way of death. And Jesus does not grasp. We do not actually fight the dragon — we are not the hero. Jesus does. Jesus is. And he tells us his kingdom features peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), that his people will reject violence, and turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), and love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and he tells his disciples to put away their swords, because those who draw the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52).
The whole point of his life was to model something different to a life under the powers, the power of Satan — the violent dominion systems, because he came to model the kingdom of God, and invite us to join him in it. Even if Revelation depicts him defeating the dragon, his victory is won at the cross, through the blood of the lamb (Revelation 12:9, 11). He confounds the beastly myth of redemptive violence and provides an altogether different story for us to live by, just like Genesis did for Israel. And he calls us to put away our swords, deny ourselves, and take up our cross — following him (Matthew 16:24). Jesus invites us to life not under the powers — the power of Satan — the violent dominion systems, but in the kingdom of God. He invites us to life in a different story — the story told in the Old Testament from start to finish — from Moses to the Prophets — Jesus says he is what holds the story together (Luke 24:26-27). He says the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets — the whole Old Testament — are written about him; that he has come to fulfil them (Luke 24:44), and that this fulfilment is not found in wielding a sword, but suffering and death on a cross, by being crucified by those who wield swords, so that he might bring forgiveness of sins and new life by the Spirit (Luke 24:46-47). His death and resurrection are the climax of history, and of the integrated collection of books in the Old Testament.
The whole story of the Bible is a story that invites us to be truly human by resisting violence and domination and the powers, and finding life in God’s kingdom.
In this story we are not the hero. We cannot save ourselves or fix the world, and the military industrial state cannot throw back the forces of chaos, because they are often aligned with the forces of chaos, even as God appoints them as the sword. Heroism in this story is not about the sword; the sword is deadly. It does not just kill our enemies as we swing it, it destroys us with every blow; violence disintegrates us, taking us further away from the life of love we were created for, that Jesus embodies.
The way of life that comes with the story of Jesus is to take up our cross. It is the life Paul describes in Philippians 2 (Philippians 2:5). A life shaped by Jesus and his story, because his story is now our story, and it provides the pattern for all our relationships. And I want to suggest that life in this story is going to involve two commitments that change how we engage in the world in ways that make us truly human — first, a commitment to being better readers of stories, and second, committing ourselves to living in God’s story, the story of Jesus, and so embracing non-violence as we embody the story of Jesus.
This will mean becoming better readers of the Bible — the sword we are meant to wield — and participants in its ongoing story, so it shapes our lives and actions (Ephesians 6:17). I reckon, often, we are not great readers of the Bible, and part of the key to reading the Bible well, especially in narrative bits, is not just to see Jesus as the fulfilment of the story, but to ask “am I seeing behaviour that is like Jesus in this story, or like the pattern of the dragon, or cursed relationships?”
The Bible is full of descriptions of violence, but that violence normally gets destructive and out of hand rather than being redemptive. So we will celebrate David slaying his giant — explicitly without a sword (1 Samuel 17:50) — but not notice how violence becomes embedded in his family system and basically destroys everything as his sons go to war with him, and each other (2 Samuel 12:10). And somehow we will say Christian men need swords or guns or violence (or flamethrowers). The story of the Bible exposes the problem with our hearts, and with the idea that we can turn to violence to solve our problems.
Being better readers of stories might also mean reading better stories. Karen Swallow Prior, who I mentioned last chapter, is a professor of literature. She has written a book called On Reading Well, about how the stories we choose to engage with can be paths to cultivating virtue, because stories do actually teach us how we should live. She reckons stories work better than facts, or other forms of education that focus on techniques, because they let us imagine different experiences so we can explore new ways to live.
“Literature replicates the world of the concrete, where the experiential learning necessary for virtue occurs. Such experiential learning does not come through technique.”
We see characters reacting to situations in ways that are concrete where ideas might be abstract. So the sorts of stories we watch, and the sort of characters that shape our imagination — that matters. As we judge the characters we encounter that shapes our own character.
“… the act of judging the character of a character shapes the reader’s own character. Through the imagination, readers identify with the character, learning about human nature and their own nature through their reactions to the vicarious experience.”
But this will also mean being more sensitive to the formative power of stories around us — not just the myth of redemptive violence, but visions of the good life built on grasping and consuming and being the hero of our own story — so we can spot the powers and disarm them, and expose them to rob them of their power over us and others; and that we might even choose stories that cultivate virtue in us.
And maybe we need more Inklings — more Tolkiens and Lewises telling stories — whether in books, or TV, or video games, or just to our kids at night — that subvert the powerful myths of our world, that offer escape, and even what Tolkien called “the eucatastrophe” — the unexpected happy ending.
“The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale… the consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn.’”
— Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
Tolkien believed our hearts desire this eucatastrophic moment because we are created to experience the unexpected happy ending caught up in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
“The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels… among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable Eucatastrophe.”
So that is the first bit. The second bit is a commitment not just to believing the story of Jesus is true, but to living in it — which will mean letting it provide the shape of our life. That will mean rejecting the myths offered by our world, by the powers, including the myth of redemptive violence, and arming ourselves instead with the sword that is God’s word by taking up our cross and following Jesus. This is harder than it sounds, but it is also less abstract than it sounds, because it is exactly what Paul is describing in Philippians 2. This is, in MacIntyre’s words, the story that teaches us “what we are to do” in any moment. The death and resurrection of Jesus are the culmination of the story of the Bible — the story that reveals the truly human life to us, both the way to life and a way of life.
The theologian Michael Gorman has been mega-helpful to me with this stuff, and he reckons Philippians 2’s retelling of the Gospel is both the central organising story of Paul’s life, and of our life as Christians. He says in the cross and resurrection Paul sees God revealing that faithful and holy opposition to evil — redemption — is not found through inflicting violence, but through absorbing violence and death, turning the other cheek.
“Covenant fidelity, justification, holiness and opposition to evil are not achieved by the infliction of violence and death but by the absorption of violence and death.”
I want to be careful here, because I am not saying that if you are being abused by the sort of person who believes that violence is a legitimate answer you should stay subject to that relationship, or the violence. What I am saying is that responding with violence, taking up the sword, produces a vicious cycle, and to forgive and relinquish that right to take up the sword and destroy your enemy is to embrace the way of Jesus. Wielding the sword, turning to violence, will always shape us, and it will shape us to believe and participate in a story that is counter to the Gospel. This also does not mean we do not let those whom God has given the sword — the government — pursue justice.
But this is where we go wrong when we think the idea for raising masculine men is teaching boys to play with guns and swords, encouraging them to kill the giants or dragons in their lives, to be the hero, and teaching girls to look for a violent protector, rather than teaching them to fight evil not by repaying evil with evil, but by embracing life in God’s story.
In this story the dragon loses as God’s power is displayed in the weakness of the cross, in Jesus’ refusal to grasp power the way Satan tempts us to, and as the full weight of the violent dominion system is brought against Jesus, God is liberating humans — his violent enemies — by forgiving us instead of crushing us and destroying our rebellion.
“The normal human temptation to squash enemies, to eliminate the impure other, is not the response of God in Christ. Instead, God reaches out to reconcile: people to God, and people to people.”
This is not the myth of redemptive violence but the story of redemptive love and grace. Our normal human impulse to squash our enemies is not the way God works. God works, through Jesus, to reach out and bring reconciliation; between us and him, and between us and each other.
This experience of love as the story of the Gospel becomes our story shapes how we live as disciples of Jesus; as we take up our cross, not because we have to throw the forces of chaos back into the abyss, but because we recognise that this is how Jesus did it, this is how he resisted the powers. He did not grasp, or embrace violence, but gave his life, suffering death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8).
Gorman says these verses are showing us what true humanity looks like, in contrast to Adam, and what true divinity looks like, as we seek to bear God’s image in the world. He says to be truly human is to be Christlike, which is to be Godlike — and for Paul, and for Gorman, this means to be crosslike in our life in the world.
“The incarnation and cross manifest, and the exaltation recognises, Christ’s true humanity, in contrast to Adam, as well as his true divinity. Therefore, to be truly human is to be Christlike, which is to be Godlike.”
The Gospel is a story that does not just restore our relationships from a pattern of sin, to a pattern of godlikeness, it transforms the way we see masculinity, or femininity — our humanity — it reshapes all our relationships, and how we understand life imitating our hero as we are transformed into his image. It calls us from violence and into communion and love and a life of reconciliation and peacemaking.
He says the church is a community that inhabits the life of God by inhabiting God’s story, as God inhabits us by his Spirit and transforms us into people who reveal his character in our lives. Our life story, in relationships pursuing the way of Jesus, embody and proclaim the story we are part of. The participation in this story and retelling of this story shapes us because it becomes the story that shapes our actions in the world.
“The church inhabits this triune, cruciform God, who in turn inhabits the church. Thus the church’s life story embodies and thereby proclaims the narrative identity and gracious saving power of the triune God.”
God is inviting you into his life, and into his story — to leave the stories of the powers behind, the violent ways of death and destruction, and find life together with him, and so to become truly human. Will you keep living as people shaped by his story as we dwell in it together?
Why generous pluralism is a better ideal than idealistic purism and provides a better future for our broad church (or why I resigned from GIST)
This week I resigned from a committee I’d been on since 2011, I was at the time of resigning, the longest serving current member. I resigned because I did not and could not agree with the statement the committee issued on the same sex marriage postal survey, and I wanted to freely and in good faith publicly say why I think it is wrong, and to stand by my previously published stance on the plebiscite.
In short, I did not think the committee’s paper fulfilled either aspects of its charter — it is not ‘Gospel-hearted apologetics’ in that there is nothing in it that engages particularly well with the world beyond the church in such a way that a case for marriage as Christians understand it might convince our neighbours of the goodness of marriage, or the goodness of Jesus who fulfils marriage in a particular way; nor do I believe it effectively equipped believers to live faithfully for Jesus in a secular society; instead, it equipped believers who were already going to vote a particular way to keep voting that way and to have some Gospel-centred reasoning to do so. I’m not convinced the way it encourages people to vote or speak about that vote, or understand the situation grapples well with our secular context; as someone not committed to a no vote already, I found the paper unpersuasive even after a significant review process.
But there was also a deeper reason for my resignation (resigning over just one paper would not be a sensible course of action) — this paper reflects a particular approach to political engagement in a fractured and complicated world that I do not support, and there was no evidence the committee would adopt an alternative strategy. I resigned because the committee failed to practice the generous pluralism that I believe the church should be practicing inside and outside our communities (on issues that aren’t matters of doctrine — there’s a difference between polytheism and pluralism). I had asked for our committee to put forward the views of each member of the committee rather than the majority, because the committee’s remit is to ‘equip believers in our churches to engage in Gospel-hearted apologetics’ and ‘to live faithfully for Jesus in a secular society’ — and I believe part of that is equipping believers to operate as generously as possible with people we disagree with in these complicated times.
The statement issued by the committee is no Nashville Statement; it is an attempt to be generous to those we disagree with, without offering a solution to a disagreement that accommodates all parties (or even as many parties as imaginable); it is also an idealistic document, and so as it seeks to push for an ideal outcome it represents a failure to listen and engage well with other people who hold other views — be they in our churches, or in the community at large. It is this failure to listen that led me to believe my energy would be better spent elsewhere, but also that leads me to so strongly disagree with the paper that I am publishing this piece.
This is not, I believe, the way forward for the church in a complicated and contested secular world; it will damage our witness and it represents the same spirit to push towards an ideal ‘black and white’ solution in a world that is increasingly complicated. I’m proud of this same committee’s nuanced work on sexuality and gender elsewhere, and don’t believe this paper reflects the same careful listening engagement with the world beyond the church and the desires of the people we are engaging with (and how those desires might be more fulfilled in knowing the love of Jesus). By not understanding these desires (not listening) our speech will not be heard but dismissed. This paper is meant to serve an internal purpose for members of our churches (so to persuade people to vote no), but it is also published externally on our website without any clarification that it is not to be read as an example of Gospel centered apologetics, so one must conclude if one reads it online, that this is a paper that serves both purposes of the committee.
I’m not the only voice speaking out in favour of pluralism, nor am I claiming to be its smartest or best spokesperson. John Inazu’s book Confident Pluralism and his interview in Cardus’ Comment magazine gave me a language to describe what I believe is not just the best but the only real way forward in what Charles Taylor calls our ‘secular age’ — where the public square is a contested space accommodating many religious and non religious views. If we want to resist the harder form of secularism which seeks to exclude all religious views from the public square, it seems to me that we either need a monotheistic theocracy (but whose?) or a pluralistic democracy that accommodates as many views as possible or acceptable; and this requires a certain amount of imagination and a sacrifice of idealism. The thing is, for many of us who’ve been brought up in an environment that defaults to the hard secular where the sexual revolution is assumed (ie anyone under about 38, or those who are a bit older but did degrees in the social sciences), we’ve already, generally, had to contest for our beliefs and adopt something like a pluralism. There are ways to prevent pluralism — like home schooling or insularly focused Christian education, but if people have grown up in a ‘public’ not stewarded by a particular stream of Christianity that deliberately excludes listening to the world, or if they are not particularly combative and idealistic types who have played the culture wars game from early in their childhood, then they are likely to have adopted something that looks pluralistic.
Here’s a quote from John Inazu’s interview with James K.A Smith, from Comment:
But it’s also not just Inazu who has spoken of pluralism; it’s also John Stackhouse in a recent piece for the ABC Religion and Ethics portal. In a piece titled Christians and Politics: Getting Beyond ‘All’ or ‘Nothing’, Stackhouse says:
Now, it’s interesting to me, particularly in the process that led to my resignation from the committee to consider how the dynamic between these three camps plays out within Christian community (it’s also interesting to consider how these three categories mesh with three I suggested using the metaphor of hands — clean hands, dirty hands, and busy hands in a post a while back); I’ll go out on a limb here and say idealism is always partisan, and so we need to be extremely careful when speaking as an institutional church if we choose to pursue idealism in the secular political sphere (especially on issues of conscience where there are arguably many possible faithful ways to respond to a situation with an imagination that rejects the status quo served up to us by others); while pluralism is the way to maintain clean hands as an institution in that model.
The idealistic stream of Christianity will see the pluralist as not just compromising politically but theologically, because while the pluralist will be operating with perhaps something like a retrieval ethic, the idealist will operate with something more like a creational ethic or a deontological ethic or a divine command ethic and so see their path as clearly the right way, and thus other paths as wrong. The pragmatist will have sympathies in both directions, and the pluralist will seek to accommodate all these views so long as they still recognise the truth the idealists want to uphold (if they don’t they’ve become ‘polytheists’). I predict the church, generally (and specifically in our denominational context) will face a certain amount of problems if not be damaged beyond repair if we put idealists in charge and they tolerate pragmatists but exclude pluralists — especially if those who have grown up needing to be pluralists to hold their faith. A push to idealism rather than confident, or generous, pluralism, will alienate the younger members of our church who are typically not yet in leadership (and this dynamic has played out in the Nashville Statement), and it will ultimately lead to something like the Benedict Option, a withdrawal from the pluralistic public square into our own parallel institutions and private ‘public’.
It’s interesting to me that GIST fought so hard against withdrawing from the Marriage Act, because, in part, the government recognises marriage contracts entered into by the parties getting married and conducted by a recognised celebrant according to our marriage rites — so there is already a difference between how we view marriage and how the state does — pluralism — but has now reverted to arguing that the government doesn’t just recognise marriage according to a broader definition than we hold but promotes and affirms particular types according to a particular definition. I know that was our argument because it was the one I spoke to in the discussion at our General Assembly.
Here’s my last smarter person that me making the case for pluralism in these times, New York Times columnist David Brooks in his review of the Benedict Option. He opens by describing two types of Christians not three — and Stackhouse’s pragmatist and pluralist categories fall into the ‘ironist’ category.
If the purists run the show we’re going to end up with a very pure church that ultimately excludes most impure people ever feeling loved enough, or understood enough, to bother listening to what we have to say. Purists are necessary though to keep us from polytheism or losing the ideals. Here’s more from Brooks:
Brooks uses ‘Orthodox’ to qualify pluralism, Inazu ‘Confident’; I’ve settled on ‘generous’ (see my review of the Benedict Option for why).
If our denomination puts the idealists/purists in power without an ethos of including the pluralists (a functional pluralism) they will always by definition exclude the pluralists; whereas if we adopt a pluralistic approach to the public square (and to how we give voice to those who disagree with us within the camp of orthodoxy) then we will necessarily also give space to the pluralists. The choice we are faced with is a choice between a broad church and a narrow one. What’s interesting is that pluralism actually becomes an ideal in itself; one of the reasons I resigned is that I am fundamentally an idealist about pluralism, once it became clear this would not be our posture or strategy, I could no longer participate (because I was excluded, but also because I am an idealist and saw the purist-idealism as an uncompromising error).
So this is a relatively long preamble to establish why I think the position adopted by GIST (idealism/purism) and how it was resolved within the committee (idealism/purism/no pluralism) is deeply problematic and a strategic misfire in our bid to engage the world with ‘gospel hearted apologetics’.
Generous pluralism and ‘living faithfully for Jesus in a secular society’ and ‘engaging in gospel-hearted apologetics’ in a polytheistic world
GIST’s philosophy of ministry acknowledges that we live in a ‘secular society’ but maintain some sort of difference from that society by ‘living faithfully for Jesus’. The idealism that Stackhouse speaks of, or purism that Brooks speaks of, will fail if society is truly secular.
Idealism will fail us because at the heart of idealism is not simply a commitment to monotheism as the option we faithfully choose amongst many contested options in the broader public, but as the option the broader public should also choose as the temporal best (following Stackhouse’s definitions). So we get, in the GIST statement, sentences like, which holds out a sort of ideal around marriage (rather than a ‘faithful life’ within a secular society):
It seems unlikely to me that this ideal of society returning wholeheartedly to God’s design for marriage (essentially a Christian society) is possible this side of the return of Jesus (which is why I’m a pluralist), and I am confused about this being an ideal that we are to pursue as Christians.
Here’s why. I think this sort of wholehearted pursuit of God’s design for marriage was an ideal in Israel (but the sense that the ideal is not actually possible is found in God’s accommodation of divorce in the law of Moses, though he hates it and it falls short of the lifelong one flesh union). I think this ultimately is a form of the pursuit of monotheism for all in society; a noble ideal formed by an eschatology where every knee will one day bow to Jesus (Philippians 2). Israel was to pursue a sort of societal monotheism — this is why they were commanded to destroy all idols and idolatrous alters — utterly — when coming into the land (Deuteronomy 4-7) and to keep themselves from idols. There is no place for polytheism — or idolatry — within the people of God (and yet the divorce laws recognise there is a place for ‘non-ideal’ broken relationships and dealing with sin to retrieve certain good outcomes). Israel was to be monotheistic and to guard the boundaries of monotheism within its civic laws. We aren’t in Israel any more — but the church is the kingdom of God, and we as worshippers of Jesus are called to monotheism in how we approach life, this is why I believe it’s important that the church upholds God’s good design for marriage in a contested public square as part of our faithful witness to God’s goodness.
Now, while an Israelite was to destroy idols when coming into the land, and Christians are to ‘keep ourselves from idols’, outside of Israel our monotheism as Christians manifests itself in the Great Commission — the pursuit of worshippers of God — disciples — through worshipping God. When Paul hits the polytheistic city of Athens as a monotheist he adopts a pluralist strategy; one based on listening to the views of the people in Athens, on understanding their idolatrous impulses, and of confidently redirecting those impulses to the true and living God. His confidence is that when the Gospel is presented as a monotheistic truth in a pluralistic culture God will work to draw people back to his design for life.
Societal shifts towards God’s design have happened historically (think Constantine and Rome), and they do happen through Christians living and proclaiming the Gospel, but I’m not entirely sure that a Christian society should be our aim rather than a society of Christians (and the difference is how people who aren’t Christians are accommodated in the laws and institutions of each — ie whether the culture is pluralistic or monotheistic). Ancient cultures were also profoundly different to our individualistic, ‘democratised’ age in that the way to convert a culture was either to conquer it (think Babylon and Israel — or the spread of Babylonian religion to the hearts of most of those they captured (but not all Israel), or Rome and the imperial cult), or to convert the king. Kings functioned as high priests of the civic religion and the very image of God, and so to convert a king was to turn the hearts of the people to a different God (think Jonah in Nineveh, or Nebuchadnezzar’s response and edicts after witnessing God’s work in Daniel, and to some extent, Constantine in Rome). It is pretty unlikely that a society wide shift like this will happen when there isn’t a close connection to the ‘civil law’ and the religion of a nation.
I would argue this approach to voting is only straightforward if you adopt a purist-idealist position and reject pluralism as a valid good. That it isn’t actually straightforward that the best thing for our society is that non-Christians be conformed to our vision of human flourishing, and so our definition of marriage, without the telos — or purpose — of human flourishing and marriage as part of that being established first.
I’d also say this is an odd interpretation of what we are being asked. The question is not ‘what would be best for society’ — to approach it that way automatically leads to adopting an ‘idealist’ position; it begs the question. What we are being asked, literally, is “should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?” In a secular society that’s an entirely more complicated question about what communities and views a secular government should recognise in its framework. The government’s responsibility is to provide the maximum amount of compromise or breadth for its citizens that can be held by consensus. It’s a tough gig. The government’s definition of marriage, including no-fault divorce, is already different from the Christian view. I marry people according to the rites of the Presbyterian Church which includes and articulates a vision of marriage connected to the telos of marriage — the relationship between Jesus and the church; the government’s definition of marriage is broader than mine, but includes mine.
This is the point at which I disagree significantly with the paper (I also disagree with the way it treats recognition as affirmation, fails to listen to, understand, and respond to the ‘human rights’ argument for same sex marriage by simply blithely dismissing it, and how it sees secular laws as establishing ideals rather than minimums (the state can and does pursue ideals through incentives and campaigns, but there are no incentives being offered to gay couples to marry that they do not already receive). The law is a blunt instrument that recognises things held as common assumptions of the minimum standards of life together, like ‘robbery is wrong’ and governments can incentivise not-robbing with welfare payments, and prevent the evil of robbery by incentivising or subsidising local governments or businesses introducing better lighting and security. Ethics aren’t formed so much by law but by the development of ideals and virtues (and arguably this happens through narratives not law, which is why so much of the Old Testament law is actually narrative even in the little explanations of different rules).
Generous Pluralism, the GIST Paper, and the Priesthood of all believers
This GIST paper was adopted after a lengthy review process, and through much discussion including three face to face meetings and deliberation by flying minute. Throughout the course of the discussion (and before it) it became clear that there were different views about what ‘faithfully living for Jesus in a secular society’ looks like; and so what equipping believers to do that looks like. I suggested we put forward the best case for different responses (an alternative to the majority view, and for it to be clear who held it and who did not, on the committee. In the discussions around the paper the majority of the committee held that we did not want to “give credence” to views other than the no vote being what equips believers to live faithfully for Jesus; even while acknowledging that my position was legitimately within our doctrinal and polity frameworks. This was ultimately why I resigned.
I don’t believe this decision to exclude a possible way to live faithfully for Jesus (and what I think is the best way) fulfils the committee’s charter if there are actually legitimate faithful ways to abstain or vote yes.
I also this fails a fundamentally Reformed principle in how we think of believers, and this principle is part of why I think a confident or generous pluralism within the church, and within the boundaries of orthodoxy, is the best way to equip believers. A confident pluralism isn’t built on the idea that all ideas are equally valid, but rather that we can be confident that the truth will persuade those who are persuaded by truth. That we can be confident, in disagreement, that a priesthood of all believers do not need a priestly or papal authority to interpret Scripture and the times for them. Believing that such a committee writes to equip such a priesthood of all believers (those our charter claims we serve), and that they should apply their wisdom, submit to scripture, and participate in the world according to conscience is the best way to equip believers to live faithfully.
A position of generous pluralism applied to a secular society outside the church probably leads to abstaining, and possibly to voting yes, depending on your ethic (how much a retrieval ethic plays into your thinking and how much you think the law affirms or normalises rather than recognising and retrieving good things from relationships that already exist (where children already exist).
Because a confident, or generous, pluralism relies on the priesthood of all believers and trusts that Christians should come to their own position assessing truth claims in response to Scripture I’m relatively comfortable with space being made for people to hear views other than mine. An example of this is that I host the GIST website, free of charge, on my private server at my cost. People are reading their views at my expense, and I will keep doing this as an act of hospitality though I believe their views are wrong. I also host and only lightly moderate comments and critical responses to things I write. This is a commitment I have to listening, to dialogue, to hospitality, to accommodation of others, to the priesthood of all believers (and a confidence that the truth will persuade those who it persuades), and to pluralism — and the lack of this commitment from others on the committee is in favour of purism-idealism, is fundamentally, why I resigned from the committee.
While the GIST paper tries to hold the created order (or ‘marriage as a creation ordinance)’ in tension with the resurrection; following the Oliver O’Donovan ‘resurrection and moral order’ model (and this was part of our discussions as a committee); the problem with creational ethics (or arguments from God’s design/natural order) that establish a universal good for all people, even non-Christians, is that they do not, in my opinion, sufficiently recognise the supremacy of Jesus or how Jesus fulfils the law and the prophets (because ‘moral law’ is still law we find in the written law of Moses that Jesus claims is written about him). This is a point at which I diverge slightly from the capital R reformed tradition, but where I think I am probably prepared to argue I’m standing in the traditions of the Reformers (sola scriptura and the priesthood of all believers).
Turning to the Reformers for a model of a political theology from our secular context is interesting; the governments operating around the Reformation (for example the German nobility, or Calvin’s Geneva) were not secular but sectarian; and, for example, Luther wrote to the German nobility to call them to act as priests as part of the priesthood of all believers, rather than be led by the pope (a vital thing to convince them of if he was going to make space for the reformation). It’s fair to say that Calvin and Luther weren’t pluralists, they played the sectarian game at the expense of Catholicism or other forms of later Protestantism (see Luther’s Against The Peasants, and of course, his awful treatise on the Jews). When someone claims their political theology is consistent with the Reformed tradition and seeks to apply it to a secular democracy, I get a little concerned.
“It is pure invention that pope, bishops, priests and monks are to be called the “spiritual estate”; princes, lords, artisans, and farmers the “temporal estate.” That is indeed a fine bit of lying and hypocrisy. Yet no one should be frightened by it; and for this reason — viz., that all Christians are truly of the “spiritual estate,” and there is among them no difference at all but that of office, as Paul says in I Corinthians 12:12, We are all one body, yet every member has its own work, where by it serves every other, all because we have one baptism, one Gospel, one faith, and are all alike Christians; for baptism, Gospel and faith alone make us “spiritual” and a Christian people…
Through baptism all of us are consecrated to the priesthood, as St. Peter says in I Peter 2:9, “Ye are a royal priesthood, a priestly kingdom,” and the book of Revelation says, Rev. 5:10 “Thou hast made us by Thy blood to be priests and kings.”
This is an interesting paper from Luther in that it doesn’t provide any sort of model for interacting with a government that is secular or not as faithful as any other members of the priesthood of all believers — instead what his political theology in his context is about is a government he treats as Christian being coerced by a church he holds to be the anti-Christ.
The Reformation was built on an epistemic humility that comes from the challenging of human authority and tradition. Where the GIST committee, in its deliberation, appealed to the Reformed category of a ‘Creation Ordinance’, I’d want to appeal to the Reformed approach to scriptures that sees everything fulfilled in Jesus — even the creation ordinances like work, Sabbath, and marriage. It’s reasonably easy to establish that Jesus is our rest and Lord of the Sabbath, that his resurrection restores our ability to work in a way that is no longer frustrated (1 Cor 15:58, Ephesians 2) — that there’s a telos or purpose to these creation ordinances that is best fulfilled in Christ, so that they can’t universally be understood by idolatrous humans without Jesus, and yet our arguments about protecting marriage or upholding marriage is that we are upholding God’s good design for all people. GIST’s paper is infinitely better than anything the ACL or the Coalition for Marriage is putting out that only argues from creation, in that it includes the infinite — by incorporating the resurrection; but the idea of a creation ordinance that should push us away from accommodating others via a public, generous, pluralism is an idealism that I would argue fails to accommodate the relationship between creation and its redeemer, and the telos of marriage (which doesn’t exist in the new creation except as the relationship between us and Jesus) (Matt 22, Rev 21).
A Confession
I’d served this committee for seven years. In the first two years I was in a minority (with another member) with a majority holding to a different sort of idealism; an idealism not built on the Gospel, but on God’s law or the ‘whole counsel of God’ (with no sense of how God’s whole counsel is fulfilled in Jesus). We orchestrated a changing of the guard on this committee that was not generous or pluralistic; we excluded a voice from the committee that was a legitimate representation of members of the Presbyterian Church of Queensland.
We pursued a platform narrower than the breadth of the church and so alienated a percentage of our members; I’ve come to regret this, while being proud of our record (and despite the committee being returned unopposed year on year since). I don’t think excluding voices is the best way to fulfil our charter, but rather a poly-phonic approach where a range of faithful options are given to the faithful — our priesthood — in order to be weighed up. This will be a challenge within the assembly of Queensland where there is a large amount of accord, but a much larger challenge within the Presbyterian Church of Queensland, which is broader (and more fractured).
Conclusion
At present in the Presbyterian denomination our committees are operating like priests or bishops; sending missives to our churches that carry a sort of authority they should not be granted in our polity; I understand the efficiencies created by governance and operations via committee, but if Luther’s priesthood of all believers is truly a fundamental principle of Reformed operation in the world we should be more comfortable and confident that people being transformed by the Spirit and facing the complexity of life in our secular world will act according to conscience and in submission to God’s word, but might operate faithfully as Christians anywhere between idealism, pragmatism and pluralism, as purists or ironists; and if we put the purist-idealists in charge (or our committees function from that framework) we might significantly narrow the church and limit our voice and imagination; cutting off opportunities for Gospel-hearted apologetics from those who might walk through our idol-saturated streets and engage differently with our idol worshipping neighbours.
September 14, 2017