With that said my question then is
can Christians say that our American social freedom stands vis-à-vis Christian
freedom, as many have portrayed it? Are
not life, liberty and happiness what God envisioned for all people? I would say to some degree, yes, this is
true, but there is an inherent danger when we attempt to marry Church and
Empire by Christianizing the features of national and political culture. Certainly, it seems alright for everyone to
work together for a peaceable and just world, but that can only happen when we
are talking about the same thing which is exactly what I am suggesting we are
not doing.
Governing or Being Governed?
Fittingly, I am writing this on the
weekend of July 4th in which we celebrate America’s
independence/freedom, but freedom from what?
This depends on who you ask. Some
will say this was the separation from the tyrannical British government who
kept imposing its demands on the colonists of America while others will say a
bunch of rich landowners just didn’t want to pay their taxes. Nevertheless, we can agree that this was the
date Congress adopted the Declaration of
Independence which was the document that outlined the reasons for the
colonial’s disconnect from Europe. The
justification John Adams and Thomas Jefferson appealed to in their draft seemed
to point to human rights as a whole. We
see this in their stating that governments in general only have the ability to
wield just Powers because the people consent to it and thus the people under a
government are entitled to “alter or abolish” any government that deny their
“unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.[1]
This was meant to give way to a government and society that would
prove its efficacy by defending its life and rights by any means necessary,
that would live according to its free will and as one sees fit, so long as no
one gets hurt, and a place that would do whatever necessary to find personal
happiness.[2] Based on what follows in the D.O.I. (pertaining
to what Europe was and wasn’t doing for its people) it would seem that a bit of
Epicurean thought was motivating their action as their conception of freedom was
based in personal pleasure and further associated with the improvement of their
material-goods and personal situations.
Today, it could be argued that this
has helped to create our hedonistic society that emphasizes worth in
individualism, pleasure in greed, need for excess, self-centeredness and
self-maximization which raises the question: are we really acting and living
freely or have we become slaves to our own vices? It
seems when we pick at someone’s vice/idol it lashes out at us revealing both its
slave and their master. So, for us to
put such societal-values on a pedestal and then defend and kill for them says
something about what or who we are loyal to. Apart from my own opinion, however, there was
and is a central ideology that stands behind what constitutes as “American
freedom” which still plays itself out to greater and lesser degrees and moderated by our justice system.
Freedom from a Deeper Bondage
In Stanley Hauerwas’ book, A Peaceable Kingdom, he points to the
idea of societal freedom as a type of ethic for both Christian and
non-Christian. Throughout his book the
point Hauerwas keeps returning to is that Christian ethics requires a
qualifier. This is to say, Christians
often appeal to any truthful ethic from God as being absolute and thereby true
for everybody, but the problem arises when we think our definition of the ethic
means the same thing as it does for the non-Christian who is also working for a
free and equitable social order. The difference
is Christian freedom is intrinsically informed by the story of God’s relationship
with Israel, the Messiah’s life death and resurrection, and a basic conviction
that both are true. Subsequently, God’s
freedom has destabilized humankind’s understanding of freedom and does not look
like what the D.O.I. proposes. While
we might say that both were trying to bring freedom from bondage, one attacks
the symptom of bondage (Though don’t forget it created bondage for others like
the Native Americans, Africans and so forth) while God actually defeated the
ultimate source of our bondage, our sin.
We thus must challenge the
belief that Christian social ethics is first and foremost to create a more peaceable
and just world. The church has been
called to first be the servant-community that lives faithfully as the church
even when its effectiveness is not so apparent and outcomes look grimm.[3] This means the essence of our freedom
is to be faithful to God which may, as Hauerwas points out, sound self-serving,
but being a faithful church means a being faithful manifestation of God’s
peaceable Kingdom in the world. Therefore, we do not
have a set of ethics we adhere to, but are a community that embodies an ethic.[4]
As we come to relocate ourselves within God’s narrative, the
freedom from sin inaugurates many new freedoms: we become rooted in a self-less
love that frees us to be peaceable, faithful, patient, kind, gentle, self
controlled. We also become free to no longer need to cling and violently defend
our idols such as money, power, comforts of life or whatever it is our hope has
come to rest in because our hope is no longer self-interpretive. Our hope,
freedom and equality are now given its content through our tradition that is
faithfully participating in God’s story.
[1]
George B. Tindall & David E. Shi. America: A Narrative History (New York W.W.
Norton & Company 2010), 139-140.
[2]
Greg Boyd. The Myth of a Christian Religion: Losing Your
Religion for the Beauty of a Revolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan
2009), 84-86.
[3] Stanley Hauerwas. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame,
Indiana University of Notre Dame 1983), 99.
[4] Ibid.
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