Dissident Reflections: Authentic Witness (PRT 8 of 8)

In this chapter Augsburger deals with how those who want bear witness to God’s kingdom might consider a more authentic approach.  Many have experienced the church’s relentless agenda to evangelize (be a witness of) the Christian faith (either in personal attempts or in reception thereof).  Yet, I think it is safe to say that the Western church has degraded, at least in some sense, what it means to be a so-called “witness”.  Two things stand at the forefront of what I am talking about.  

   

Jesus For Sale

First, through fine salesmanship the church has mastered capitalism by making Jesus intelligible, palatable and thereby sellable to everyone.  At its “best” it looks like Christian-apologetics and evangelism-tracks, and at its worst it looks like “health, wealth and prosperity”.[1] The first feeds the arrogant tendency to always correct others, breath superiority or sum Jesus up on a post-card, while the second feeds the narcissism that perpetually asks, what’s in it for me?    

However, can we really say Jesus is a commodity for mass consumption?  Absolutely… not!  If we are to be honest with others this is not a shallow endeavor and should never be presented that way.  To encounter Jesus is to first come face-to-face with the darkest parts of ourselves, the world and admit everything is not alright.  Only when we face such despair and the reality of an “end” can we see the need for new life and hear a message of hope that makes sense.  

Yet, Jesus as a message of hope will always look like naïveté and foolishness to those who believe they are independent or in control (hence the reason for its more frequent acceptance among those living outside of social and economic comforts). It easier to distract ourselves from the reality of our imminent end than it is to permit ourselves to feel and express the fear and pain of its constant presence.  Yet it is precisely in God’s embrace of this end (on the cross) that the new could finally begin. 

As a side note, confronting people with the Ten Commandments to show them how flawed they are does not do what well-meaning Christians think it does either. The Law usually only means something to those who already believe it or are scared by its condemning prospect in which case you are only selling “get out of hell” assurance and not a life with God that reconciles creation through us. Nevertheless, confrontational evangelism is not helpful for many and tends to push them away from God. 

Talk… If You Must

The second point is (and this wholly ties in with the first) people are turned off by the hypocrisy… and rightly so!  When there is nothing to authenticate our witness people will not have very much reason to listen. Anything we have to say may be words with content, but they have no visible context.

I think the remedy to this was said most clearly by Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary use words.”[2]  We must exemplify what we believe and yet we seem perfectly comfortable acting in ways that are opposite of love, patience, gentleness, kindness and so on towards one another (Gal. 5:22-23).  We can only authenticate our message with actions of congruency “when the content spoken and the context experienced validate each other… therefore the authentic witness is not the charismatic personality of an individual, nor the perfection of a particular life; it is the presence of a community of witnesses who verify, validate and authenticate their life together.”[3]

Moreover, this is a shared task and it begins with faithful presence, concern and service with each other. It has been said that this was probably Jesus’ fail-safe mechanism within the Gospel in that the only ones to be trusted with the “Great Commission” were the ones who epitomized love for God and love for neighbor in their daily life.[4]  We would do well to take notice of how Jesus sequences his instruction to the disciples.  Upon entering a city, when received in hospitality, eat with them (identifying in solidarity), then offer compassion, service and aid, (agape-love) and then lastly speak a verbal witness so to reinforce the living witness (God’s kingdom has come near you) (Lk. 10:8-9).[5]

At the same time, if we wait until we are good enough to bear sufficient witness we may never get around to it, as Augsburger also points out.  Certainly God works through us despite us as the truth itself is much more life-giving than the flawed ones who carry it.

But it does not diminish the point that “authentic witnesses practice the way of humble and authentic service as embodiment, and in time they give their faith voice and name, Jesus’s name. The spiritual practice of authentic witness finds its center in the life lived more than the word given.”[6]  This is something that should be prevalent in our daily rhythms of life, but it takes accepting that the problem exists before we can adequately address it. 

The End of My Series

This is actually not the last chapter of the book, but it is as far as I wanted to go with it.  Obviously there is much more to it all than I covered, but if anything I hope it conveyed some areas within the Christian life that we should be willing to question, challenge and grow in.  If we are really behaving like Jesus did, does and taught us to it requires a dissent from the current state of things so to attest to God’s subversive rule. 

Nevertheless, I must conclude that Augsburger does not disappoint and it is certainly worth the read for anyone seriously considering communal spirituality and discipleship in a way that reflects the Gospel… but that is just my opinion.  

[1] Apologetics is a field that was formed for the sole purpose of attacking the Enlightenment and proving our rightness by defending God and making him comprehensible.  Well I am pretty sure God does not need us to defend him, but he does want us to live in relationship with him and each other. That relationship looks like respect, love and humility that is given its content by God’s grace.

[2] David Augsburger Dissident Discipleship (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazo Press 2006), 171.

[3] Ibid, 176, 179.

[4] Ibid, 177.

[5] Ibid, 183-184.

[6] Ibid, 186-187.

Dissident Reflections: Concrete Service

(Augsburger prt 7) For this chapter, instead summarizing/reflecting-on its ideas I just want to leave a quote from it that I think sums-up what service should be. It is perhaps above all a condition of the heart that produces service, whether necessary-service and voluntary-service, rather than someone who strives to do good things just because they are supposed to (which most often leads to burn-out or turns into resentful efforts).

Service that is necessary—required, owed, obligated, contracted—may be offered with genuineness, concern, compassion, and thoroughness.  Or it can be done grudgingly, of necessity under duress.  One does what has to be done.

Service that is voluntary falls into a completely different category.  It arises out of unbidden concern, undemanded interest, unowed compassion.  This is the service that comes close to being the actions of love.  It is offered by free choice because of the nature of the servant.  One does what one sees as needed. 

Most service is mixed, with necessary and voluntary aspects occurring together.  Perhaps one serves because it is a career—a chosen course—and for a salary does what is necessary, fulfilling all requirements. But when one goes beyond what is expected, the service becomes voluntary; when one gives without self-centered motivation, the caregiving becomes an act of freedom; when one transcends what is expected or required, one serves joyfully, freely, out of the exuberant excess called love.  Service moves from the quid pro quo of “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” to the practice of benevolence and sacrifice in meeting others’ needs. 

Spirituality meets service as it calls one to go the second mile, to offer the second act of caring, to reach out without asking, “But what’s in it for me?” Spirituality is the voluntary element in serving another that links persons with loving concern; spirituality is the voluntary connection of social interest, fellow-feeling, and mutual aid…

…Spirituality and service are sometimes viewed as direct opposites.  Spirituality is believed to be detached from tasks of life, the concrete acts of caregiving, the mundane, the routine, the earthly, the material; the spiritual reaches toward transcendent, the ineffable, the heavenly… Spirituality in a tripolar key does not divide the heavenly from the earthly, the sacred from the profane. All can be viewed as service when service is defined as work done in voluntary, caring relationship.[1]    

Do you agree… disagree?  Think about it.

[1] David Augsburger Dissident Discipleship (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazo Press 2006), 156-157.

Dissident Reflections: Resolute Nonviolence

(Augsurger prt 6) I was hesitant to write anything on this chapter not because I disagree with nonviolence, but because I have already spent much time writing about it in essays, on my blog (see here here and here) and have recently been addressing it on other theological forums…

So, what changed my mind?  Well first, it is a quick opportunity to put out there why I stand here (I have yet to do this in any of my arguments against it).  Second, while Augsburger’s overall case for resolute nonviolence is not all that dissimilar from my own (though he is much more gracious and gentle than I tend to be toward those who just don’t see it… I’m working on it) he offers a helpful set of nonviolent affirmations that all Christians should, at least, consider.  Whether you believe in “just war” or “nonviolence” if you are committed to Christ then I promise it will not be a waste of your pondering-time. And if you are just a curious reader then perhaps this is an opportunity to see that instances like the Crusades or Protestant-Catholics wars were antithetical to Christ.

Why I Advocate Nonviolence

While I grew up in a Christian home, I did not grow up in a home that was anti-war (I think my parents did question it at some point, but they were encouraged to view it as a necessary evil).  In fact I come from a long line of military and war-veterans and at one point thought of it as my own future career opportunity.  So, this was something I would later come to on my own through various experiences and understanding the Bible for myself.[1]

As a result I realized I could no longer reconcile things like war and violence with what Jesus taught.  My position is actually as simple as that, but I will elaborate anyway.  Jesus spent a lot of time rejecting, what Walter Wink summed up as, the “system of domination”.[2]  This was what the entire cosmos had become in Jesus’ eyes and he regularly spoke against it. This is obvious when he commands us to be non-retaliatory and to love one’s enemies (Mat. 5:43-48), he claims to have come to fulfill God’s promise to release the captives, heal the blind and to let the oppressed go free (Lk. 4:18-21), he suggested that lording power over each other was pagan behavior and not God’s desire (Lk. 22:24-26), he claims that neither he nor his followers belong to this dominating-world and are hated by it (Jn. 17:14, 16) and he insists that all who follow him would commit to his ways (Jn. 14:23-24).

Assuming this is true, I want to make the statement that all acts of violence (no matter how justified) are intrinsically acts of domination. The only end-result violence can seek is to leverage power in the same domination system Jesus condemned.  To use Augsburger’s notion here, when we commit an act of violence we have placed faith in that domination system. The commitment to answer in violence is obedience to that domination system.  Any allegiance to the values that the domination system holds are inherently the same affirmations that we find in the superiority of a gender, culture, color, economic status and/or hemisphere position (i.e. North vs. South).[3]   However, when our commitment and allegiance is to “Jesus as Lord” we cannot simultaneously  take Jesus’ side and continue in the way of domination.  It then only made sense that the way of the cross pointed to nonviolence and always worked toward reconciliation even when it costs us.

With this said, I do know from personal experience that no matter how sound my position may seem (in my mind) it becomes a target for endless counter-arguments.  So, my point is that my espousing this rarely changes hearts, and it receives lots of criticism and lots of “well what would you do if…” questions, and there are times when living it out feels ineffectual. But, I do not do it because it is popular, or because I am trying to make less of evil (I take it very seriously) or because it is guaranteed to work-out perfectly in every scenario.  Rather, I commit to nonviolence because it is my act of faithfulness/commitment to the God that is revealed in Jesus. I believe it is as much a political statement as it is a religious confession to say that Jesus is Lord and the rulers of the world/domination system are not.  Now, while my initial thoughts about this were not this developed, these words do embody the feelings and confusion I couldn’t get past when reading about Christ.  While there is much more that could be said about this (and I will address in future posts on restorative justice and so on) this is the basis of it

Spirituality of Nonviolence

As stated before, whether you agree with Augsburger’s affirmations of nonviolence they should at least make you think very seriously about Christ’s radical way and its broader implications for his followers:

·         Love for God and love for neighbor are two aspects of the same love.  Jesus was wholly faithful to God and truly faithful to fellow humanity. We live out his love.

·         No one for whom Christ died can be to us an enemy.  If Christ already suffered the death penalty for a person who has committed a capital offense, how can I reenact it without invalidating all Christ offered and suffered?  We carry out his mission.

·         No one is expendable or disposable.  No one is absolutely or inapproachably incapable of loving; no one is absolutely or unapproachably incapable of being loved. All persons are within the love of Christ.  We join him in his work of love.

·         We do not fear or avoid conflict.  We refuse to believe the lie that violence is the answer to conflict.  We believe in peacemaking. 

·         To love God, our neighbor, our enemy and ourselves requires persistent, relentless commitment to the way of Jesus.[4]

                                                              References

[1] More to my surprise was that I could not find very many other Christians who agreed with nonviolence.  That is until I was writing a paper my first semester in college, on a similar topic, and while doing research came across the Anabaptists (at which point I had a “where you been all my life” moment).  After digging deeper I now know there have been many Christian thinkers who drew the same conclusion (the majority of the early Christians, Leo Tolstoy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Stanley Hauerwas, N.T. Wright, Walter Brueggemann, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton and most of the Franciscan Order, MLK Jr., Greg Boyd, Dallas Willard, Richard Foster and many more)  but much of the way of nonviolence and alternative solutions has been paved by a long Anabaptist tradition and their insightful work of uncalculated love and reconciliatory-justice that should be learned from.

[2] David Augsburger Dissident Discipleship (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazo Press 2006), 138.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 143-144.

Dissident Reflections: Habitual Humility

Why yes this is the Tower of Babel.
(The antithesis of all things humble)

(Augsburger PRT 5) I am finding humility is a difficult topic.  The first time I assign the attribute to myself apparently it ceases to be true.  I guess “humility claimed is pride renamed” and all that.[1]  Yet, if we are to know humility as it could be we might first ask what does lack-of-humility look like (well I would anyway).  If I might be vague for a moment, and don’t worry I’ll eventually explain, pride has a propensity to grip personal identity with more complexity than it would seem, and that pride even occurs when we think we are acting humble.

The Kingdom of I

Pride is most often understood as self-exaltation and that would not be wrong.  Augsburger illustrates that self-exalting pride lends itself well to spiritualities of superiority, self-confident domination, misuse of others, egotism in being right and disregard for others.  This is the pursuit of perfectionism and a quest to maintain a “holier than thou” status.[2]  We have seen this kind of spirituality play itself many times throughout history (This was Jesus’ and Paul’s contention with Pharisees and other covenant-people and it is many people’s contention Constantinian forms of Christianity and on it could go). 

            It is in self-exaltation that it is easiest to see pride, at its core, always lives comparatively.  This means that “one is not proud simply of being brilliant, handsome, beautiful or successful; one becomes proud by evaluating the self as more brilliant, handsome, beautiful or successful than another.”[3]  The perfectionist quest can only be attained through comparative processes, but true humility is not in the conscious-self who lives in competition constantly measuring self up to others.

This brings me to my next point.  Humility is often thought of as self-abasement in which we demean ourselves to the point of self-hatred, but this too is actually another form of pride. Humility is no more self-abasement than it is self-exaltation. Any humility that devalues or denigrates itself will first, easily be self-absorbed, and second, inevitably come to see others as equally worthless.[4] 

Moreover, this self-absorption begins the comparative process again except now it is in the the form of being “humbler than thou.”  I think we can see this simultaneous self-debasement and self-exaltation happening with the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. The Pharisee is billing God for his credit due saying that he has sacrificed and humbled himself to great lengths and thanks God that his humility is better than the tax collecting outcast who is praying across the way. Meanwhile the tax collector humbly prays for mercy without any comparative regard for the Pharisee (Lk. 18:9-14).  Perhaps it the Pharisee is more exalting than debasing, but the point is intact and we can see such pseudo-piousness only pretends humility either way it goes.   

Habitual Humility     

So then what is true humility look like (wait, do I lose my humility by claiming to know the answer)?  Oh well here it is (it’s really Augsburger’s anyway): True humility can see both the self and other as worthful and will neither exalt nor devalue either.  Humility, as thought by Madeline L’Engle, is the act of becoming self-forgetful in exchange for complete concentration on something or someone else.[5]  “Whether this happens in the creative moment, in love for the neighbor, in an act of compassion for another’s pain, in the practice of service for others, in the performance of any skill, art or profession, such concentration on the welfare of other is both the deepest forgetfulness of the self and the fullest realization of the self.”[6]

            Lastly, humility is embracing our imperfection. We should be self-effacing whenever we make attempts to speak about things like virtues, goodness, or moral high grounds.  Without modesty (holding what believe with an open hand, not clenched fist) our egos will easily revert back to leveraging control over others by what we claim to be true.   

Standing vis-à-vis with such embrace is finding the humor in humanity.  This is not to judgmentally laugh at the failures of others, but to recognize our hollow pull of self-preference that detracts from concern for others.   We can recognize, laugh at and deny our own pretenses and not always take ourselves so seriously.

Humor teaches us humility; humility inspires our humor. It helps us see ourselves for what we really are—a bit of dust, a flash of light that burns for a brief second; it nudges us to see life for what it truly is—the search for, not the possession of, truth.  One can hold to truth with deep commitment and at the same time handle it with humor.  Reverence and irreverence belong together like conviction and imagination, like mature respect and childlike impudence.[7]

Therefore, habitual humility can be a significant sign of Christlike discipleship where we can live in sincerity of joy in service, modesty in our own abilities and the unflinching ability to smile at and walk away from our pretenses and self-awareness all for the good of another.

[1] David Augsburger Dissident Discipleship (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazo Press 2006), 99.

[2] Ibid, 120.

[3] Ibid, 119.

[4] Ibid, 118.

[5] Ibid, 119.

[6] Ibid.

 [7] Ibid, 103.