This is a section of an article taken from Jurgen Moltmann's, The Crucified God and his critique from both sides, i.e. the Conservative and Revolutionary sides, whereby I identify with the second. His critique from both sides is what we in the church need to hear, since both sides have so closely identified with the structures of power, which makes and re-makes God into our image of strength, which will in turn suppress the qualities of Christianity which we perceive as weak, but are imperative to being a Christian.
Whether we are conservative or revolutionary, whether we are satisfied with our society or want to transform it, we all believe at bottom in action and success. We are convinced that we can solve all problems through right programs and actions. As Sidney Hook observes, western society is an officially optimistic society. The built-in values of our life and our system condemn us to activity, success, profit, and progress. If we experience failure, if we are frustrated, then we move on to another place, "where the action is." "What can, what must, we do? What next?" Those are our only questions, for we hate to admit and reflect upon what misery our optimism and our programs of action have inflicted upon other persons and upon nature. The conservatives are proud of the successes which they and their fathers have brought to pass. The revolutionaries want to see different and new successes. They look for "God's activity in history" and want to be "where things are happening most dynamically."
Both stem from the same stock and sit in the same boat. Who is their God? He is the God of action, the strong God ever on the side of the stronger battalions, the God who wins battles and leads his own to victory. He is the idol of mankind's "history of success." This God is power, and only successful faith makes an impression. What follows from the divinity of this God for the humanity of life? Life then means only acting and producing, making and prevailing. This one-sided orientation toward action and success, however, makes men inhuman and represses the other weaker and more sensitive side of life. From this perspective, those who suffer are sick; those who weep and mourn show no stamina. The world has nothing more to say to us. It does not touch us. One can do with the world what one wants. No despair need tear at our hearts. We become hard in the give and take of life. The suffering of others makes no impression on us. Love is no longer a passion, but only a sexual act.
The man of success does not weep, and he keeps smiling only out of courtesy. Coldness is his style. That which his activity demands he calls "good"; that which hinders his success is "bad." The other man is simply his competitor in the struggle for existence. "Survival of the fittest" is his eschatology. Just as he wants to control the world, so also he holds himself under self-control. In short, he who believes in the God of action and success becomes an apathetic man. He takes no more notice of the world, of other men, or of his emotions. He remains oblivious to the suffering his actions cause. He does not want to know about that and represses crucifying experiences from his life.
The God of success and the apathetic man of action completely contradict what we find at the core of Christianity: the suffering God and the loving, vulnerable man. On the other hand, the crucified God contradicts the God of success and his idol-worshippers all the more totally. He contradicts the officially optimistic society. He also contradicts the revolutionary activism of the sons of the old establishment. "The old rugged cross" contradicts the old and the new triumphal theology (theologia gloria) which we produce in the churches in order to keep pace with the transformations of an activistic and rapidly changing society.
We, too, find the memory of the crucified God discomforting. We gladly falsify it by changing the cross into an idol of our driving practical optimism in various crusades. As Douglas Hall has written: "The greatest misfortune would be if Christians used the Theology of Hope as just another religious aid for avoiding the experience of the cross that many in our sector of the battlefield can no longer avoid."In fact, there is no true theology of hope which is not first of all a theology of the cross. There will be no new hope for humanity, if it does not arise from the destruction of the apathetic "man of action" through a recognition of the suffering that he causes. Apathetic existence must be changed into its opposite: an existence of pathos leading to sympathy, sensitivity, and love. There will be no Christian, that is, no liberating theology without the life giving memory of the suffering of God on the cross.
Two hundred years ago, European society was already travelling the optimistic and erroneous path of active world improvement. For the Enlightenment period, the world of nature, principles, and ideas was a reflection of the power and glory of God. If man would only correspond morally to this glorious world of God, then the kingdom of God would be realized! Then in 1755 came the famous Lisbon earthquake, and optimism collapsed, reverting into pessimism and even nihilism.
The corresponding "earthquakes" of our time are not found in nature and physical evil, but rather in history and in inhuman evil. For my people, as executioners, and for the Jews, as victims, it is Auschwitz. As a German I do not have the right to say it, but for the American people, as executioners, and for the Vietnamese, as victims, it may be called Vietnam, not to mention the sad history of slavery between white and black in western civilization. For us who are white, rich, and dominant, it is the cry of the starving, oppressed, and racially victimized masses. For our technocratic society, it may become the silent death of nature, carrying us to destruction. At this point, too, our optimism collapses. What will take its place? Cynicism and apathy?
Allow me to become personal here for a moment. Ten years ago, I went through the remains of the concentration camp at Maidanek in Poland. With each step it became physically more difficult to go further and look at the thousands of children's shoes, clothing remnants, collected hair, and gold teeth. At that moment I would have preferred from shame to be swallowed up by the earth, if I had not believed: "God is with them. They will rise again." Later, I found in the visitors' book the inscriptions of others: "Never again can this be allowed to happen. We will fight to see that this never again comes to pass." I respect this answer, but it does not help the murdered ones. I also respect my own answer, which I gave at that time. But it is not sufficient.
How is faith in God, how is being human, possible after Auschwitz? I don't know. But it helps me to remember the story that Elie Wiesel reports in his book on Auschwitz called Night. Two Jewish men and a child were hanged. The prisoners were forced to watch. The men died quickly. The boy lived on in torture for a long while. "Then someone behind me said: "Where is God?' and I was silent. After half an hour he cried out again: 'Where is God? Where is he? And a voice in me answered: 'Where is God?. . . he hangs there from the gallows…. (Jurgen Moltmann: The Crucified God) Full article can be found on the blog face page.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Leviathan
This summer I will be participating in a Summer Fellowship at the Western Justice Center Foundation in Pasadena. The Western Justice Center was founded in 1996 and is actively involved in initiating, developing, and implementing programs in society aimed towards the dissemination of violence, through dialogue and teaching. The program that I will be engaged in developing this summer will be designing a Conflict Resolution Seminar for the Pasadena Police Department. Although I believe that I have a healthy critique of the overall function of the police in our society, this program is attempting to teach police officer's how to handle and re-direct conflict within their own department and on various calls for service.
My critique of the police is not necessarily the fault of the police themselves, but the fault of our culture in its individualistic mindset which has subsequently transferred control in society over to the government, who have taken that control and systematically created; Leviathan. In this sense, I am referring to the Enlightenment use of the word Leviathan, used by Thomas Hobbes' book in 1651 entitled: The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly called Leviathan, which has detailed the social contract which must be controlled by a "strong central government", which does not support any "right of rebellion," which was later supported by John Locke and Jean-Jacque Rousseau. This is in a sense Hobbes' own hermeneutic of biblical Revelation, in that Leviathan could be a metaphor for chaos in society, which must be put in order by God's instrument of divine order; the state.
This is a summary of Hobbes' Leviathan in his own words this describes his belief about the power of OUR state, please read carefully:
"The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry and by the fruits of the earth they may nourish themselves and live contentedly, is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person; and every one to own and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their judgements to his judgement. This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner as if every man should say to every man: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that, by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the Commonwealth; which, to define it, is: one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all as he shall think expedient for their peace and common defence."
The goal of our understanding of Conflict Resolution then should come from the perspective of "the other". This "other" according to Hobbes should have their wills placed under the dominion of the Commonwealth because in essence, "humans can not be trusted". We then as Christians must acknowledge that out of this belief proceeded modernity and as we continue to move towards post-modernity we be careful to understand that we see "the other" through our worldview and the lens which has been created through the social structure of what Hobbes has detailed above. This "Commonwealth" which Hobbes created is in fact the Roman state wrapped in a new package and presented to humanity as that which will bring the "peace" which we desire. The very peace which we desire can in fact create another system which will justify the suppression of ideas based upon our belief in a "universal umbrella of logic" which will define how we act towards anyone who may disagree with us. To quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer he stated,
"The mistake of Anglo-Saxon thought is the subordination of truth and justice to the ideal of peace. Indeed, such a view assumes that the very existence of peace is proof that truth and justice have prevailed. Yet such a view is illusory just to the extent that the peace that is the reality of the Gospel is identified with the peace based on violence. No peace is peace but that which comes through the forgiveness of sins. Only the peace of God preserves truth and justice. So “neither a static concept of peace (Anglo-Saxon thought) nor even a static concept of truth (the interpretation put forward by Hirsch and Althaus) comprehends the Gospel concept of peace in its troubled relationship to the concepts of truth and righteousness.”
What can not be missed in this concept of peace as quoted by Bonhoeffer is the fact that it was developed on the system of Hobbes', Leviathan which in reality is always extremely violent. So, peace gained at the expense of violence is never the goal of peace. This is what Rev. Jeremiah Wright has said which caused so much controversy. Those who have participated in the system of peace brought by Leviathan have lived fairly comfortably, making the kingdom of God fit into this so-called, "structure of peace". But to those whom were on the receiving end of Leviathan, they were consumed by the "breath of his nostrils"!
Hobbes himself was reacting towards the wars created by "passionate man", his answer was to subvert passionate man with a dominant state. The whole point of the Enlightenment was the develope a "unifying scientific rationale which will allow everyone to agree", but when that didn't work, the state was created as; Leviathan.
My critique of the police is not necessarily the fault of the police themselves, but the fault of our culture in its individualistic mindset which has subsequently transferred control in society over to the government, who have taken that control and systematically created; Leviathan. In this sense, I am referring to the Enlightenment use of the word Leviathan, used by Thomas Hobbes' book in 1651 entitled: The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly called Leviathan, which has detailed the social contract which must be controlled by a "strong central government", which does not support any "right of rebellion," which was later supported by John Locke and Jean-Jacque Rousseau. This is in a sense Hobbes' own hermeneutic of biblical Revelation, in that Leviathan could be a metaphor for chaos in society, which must be put in order by God's instrument of divine order; the state.
This is a summary of Hobbes' Leviathan in his own words this describes his belief about the power of OUR state, please read carefully:
"The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry and by the fruits of the earth they may nourish themselves and live contentedly, is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person; and every one to own and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their judgements to his judgement. This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner as if every man should say to every man: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that, by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the Commonwealth; which, to define it, is: one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all as he shall think expedient for their peace and common defence."
The goal of our understanding of Conflict Resolution then should come from the perspective of "the other". This "other" according to Hobbes should have their wills placed under the dominion of the Commonwealth because in essence, "humans can not be trusted". We then as Christians must acknowledge that out of this belief proceeded modernity and as we continue to move towards post-modernity we be careful to understand that we see "the other" through our worldview and the lens which has been created through the social structure of what Hobbes has detailed above. This "Commonwealth" which Hobbes created is in fact the Roman state wrapped in a new package and presented to humanity as that which will bring the "peace" which we desire. The very peace which we desire can in fact create another system which will justify the suppression of ideas based upon our belief in a "universal umbrella of logic" which will define how we act towards anyone who may disagree with us. To quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer he stated,
"The mistake of Anglo-Saxon thought is the subordination of truth and justice to the ideal of peace. Indeed, such a view assumes that the very existence of peace is proof that truth and justice have prevailed. Yet such a view is illusory just to the extent that the peace that is the reality of the Gospel is identified with the peace based on violence. No peace is peace but that which comes through the forgiveness of sins. Only the peace of God preserves truth and justice. So “neither a static concept of peace (Anglo-Saxon thought) nor even a static concept of truth (the interpretation put forward by Hirsch and Althaus) comprehends the Gospel concept of peace in its troubled relationship to the concepts of truth and righteousness.”
What can not be missed in this concept of peace as quoted by Bonhoeffer is the fact that it was developed on the system of Hobbes', Leviathan which in reality is always extremely violent. So, peace gained at the expense of violence is never the goal of peace. This is what Rev. Jeremiah Wright has said which caused so much controversy. Those who have participated in the system of peace brought by Leviathan have lived fairly comfortably, making the kingdom of God fit into this so-called, "structure of peace". But to those whom were on the receiving end of Leviathan, they were consumed by the "breath of his nostrils"!
Hobbes himself was reacting towards the wars created by "passionate man", his answer was to subvert passionate man with a dominant state. The whole point of the Enlightenment was the develope a "unifying scientific rationale which will allow everyone to agree", but when that didn't work, the state was created as; Leviathan.
So, here is the question, "How do we resolve conflicts?" Any responses are appreciated. Thanks, Love ya' all, Paul
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