“Making America Great Again: Fairy Tale? Horror Story? Dream Come True?” Review

Mike Morrell’s Speakeasy has supplied me with a digital copy of, Making America Great Again: Fairy Tale? Horror Story? Dream Come True?, and in exchange I am only asked to give an honest review.

This, thus far, is Dr. David N. Moore’s only published book (2017), though I do believe he has been a contributor to Huffington Post. Before I began this read, Moore was sadly not on my radar, but now I can only hope he continues publishing. He, by profession, is a pastor, educator and ecumenical teacher, and in my own estimation, a sharp (prophetic even) culture critic, a contemplative, a voice of compassion and someone we should all be listening to.

While the title of this book might make some assume that it is only a challenge to the current White House administration, I can assure you it offers far more substance than even that. This is not to say that it is absent of such critiques, but it is not central to Moore’s aim. What is central is waking the church up and bringing her face-to-face with her failures while also empowering action toward healing.  As one who has known and felt the harms of prejudice, Dr. Moore begins by sharing his own journey through Evangelical Christianity which led him to unmask the structural-racism that the Western Church has blindly and tragically bought into. Interestingly, though not surprisingly, he shows how the work of colonization has in part been culpable in its uniting the dominant-society by employing myths, symbols and promises of supremacy.

But, this only sets the stage for Dr. Moore to shed light on the deeper problems that keep us isolated and immersed in hatred and distrust. He marks out how the church became a culture that would sell itself to power and follow an anti-Gospel politic; a politic that excludes and blames the very victims it helps create.

Yet, where David criticizes he also energizes and inspires a shared vision. He says, “…I have experiences that I cannot explain and that point me to an interconnectedness that convinces me that we all have a stake in our collective existence.”[1]  His Christian theology and ethic rightly sees that our stories are woven together in such a way that we belong to each other and community always supersedes power. He continues, “Away with graceless Christianity, so full of suspicion and devoid of mercy! Out with the old and in with the new hope of Jesus. Even with its persistent sorrows, ubiquitous disappointments and lingering aches of the soul, life is hopeful. This will be realized increasingly in the days to come as more of us discover how not alone we are.”[2] David’s words are an open letter to the church in a time where, for the sake of its own health and witness, it needs this challenge and needs to repent and change course so that we may mend.

I honestly cannot give this book enough praise. Dr. Moore is a skilled and insightful writer. Making America Great Again, is written with a broad audience in mind, but more specifically an audience who will take the time to both listen and hear. While this book is a great stand alone read, if you are like me and like reading books on a theme in succession, then the writings of MLK, Howard Thurman, James Cone, Cornel West, Jon Sobrino and Miguel A. De La Torre would all accompany Dr. Moore very well. Happy reading!

You can purchase a copy of Making America Great Again at these two links: 

https://www.amazon.com/Making-America-Great-Again-Horror-ebook/dp/B072FW1N2F/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1537369753&sr=8-1&keywords=david+n+moore

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/making-america-great-again-david-moore/1126122685

Reference

[1] David N. Moore. Making America Great Again: Fairy Tale? Horror Story? Dream Come True? (Crowdscribed, LLC. Kindle Edition.), Kindle Locations 1406-1407.

 [2] Ibid, 2036-2038.

Review of "Healing Justice: Stories of Wisdom and Love"

I was fortunate enough to receive an advanced copy of this book from the author himself and my only obligation is to give it an honest review. And before anyone points it out, yes, I have not given a bad review to any of the books I have reviewed, but this is not because I am not critical. Rather it is because I do not have time to read books that suck, nor do I have a desire to draw attention them either. So I am very careful about which ones I accept.

With that said, Jarem Sawatsky has written a book for our time touching on the topics of relationships, conflict, grief and healing; basically much of the human experience.

Jarem takes his readers through three different communities that are genuine alternatives to the problematic norms and beliefs of dominate culture. Healing Justice is built on the premise that there is brokenness in people and brokenness in the ethos that forms our civilizations, but it has deteriorated the human ability to build and maintain healthy relationships.

 However, the communities’ stories that we hear from in this book model ways of being and relating that are healing; ways in which peace is not an end objective, but a way of doing life together and belonging to each other. In an age where we deconstruct and forget to reconstruct, this shows the process of doing such a rebuilding from the micro to macrocosm, specifically in a way that administers healing to everyone. This is no shallow feel good story, but it shows the complexity of succeeding in some areas and failing in others all while having to listen, learn, and change together.

Healing Justice comes from an academic version the author had previously written, but the goal here was to make a version accessible to all audiences, which he does well. It is also worth noting that his research is not just a disconnected intellectual project, but it does draw from his personal struggles as-well-as from the time he spent with each community observing and learning from them. This book is definitely worth the read and at least a re-read as there is much to glean from their stories.

What Story Are We Telling Again?

What happens when we remove the cross from its theological context? We get heretical memes that believe these symbols are identical.  This picture became popular because it was meant to protest Colin Kaepernick and other athletes who knelt during the national anthem. Their gesture, however, is not even meant to be disrespectful to America or the anthem (leave that to me), but it was meant to be a protest speaking out against unchecked discrimination and racism in our justice system and how that stands against “American” values. That is to say so long as racism is acceptable, especially from those in authority, they will not participate in an anthem celebrating, or pledging allegiance to, that kind of America.

To a point, I can actually respect this and do not see, as many have said, an overpaid “privileged” man whining, but I see a man with a platform and deeper thoughts in his head than what his athletic season will look like. He saw an opportunity to disrupt the whole damned system and he did (at least to some degree)! What he probably did not intend on was where the backlash would become focused. Most of the people who are upset over it have argued very little against the idea that there is corruption in the justice system, but they have argued, threatened and made clear Kaepernick has messed with one of our dearest national idols. On top of it, the NFL in its own effort to NOT upset its wealthy sponsors and hurt their own finances recently issued new rules in regards to the national anthem in which protesting athletes are now to wait in the locker room until after the anthem. All of these actions of outrage and complicity are very telling and so are the memes, like this, that have spawned from it.

I believe that the Christians who insist on this meme of cross, soldier and flag as some kind of truth are really quite confused. Each of these symbols are rooted in different stories and meanings and I promise the cross stands in conflict to the flag, along with its subsequent flag liturgies, and to the soldier's occupation (unless the military encourages you to love your enemies). The flag alone seems to be as sacred as the liturgical use of cross. There is a whole host of rules and etiquette for hoisting and lowering the flag, displaying the flag (the how when, with, where and direction) and the disposing of the flag in honorable and dignified ways when it becomes desecrated. The fact that the flag always demands the most preferred honorable position in the room elevated high and lifted up above the profane should tell you that you’ve invited some kind of an idol into your midst. Idols are different than sacred objects because idols often demand worship and the sacrifice of the another's well being. 

With that in mind, allow give brief definitions for the symbols in the meme above are as such: the flag's meaning is rooted in the beliefs and values of the founding fathers such as their ideas about purity, innocence, valor, justice and sovereignty.[1] The soldier is a symbol of security and protection while on earth. And the cross, in this context, is rooted in the belief that Jesus came to help you escape earth and hell when you die (which is closer a Gnostic idea than a Christian one).

The cross in theology is a central part of Christianity, but the story it is rooted in has obviously been just as manipulated and twisted as any national symbol of propaganda. Yet, there is a real difference when interpreted well. The cross was not fabricated to unite a country, but God (touching the profane) used a real object of terror and murder to reveal himself as forgiver and savior from our most monstrous constructs. The cross breaks the cycle of sacrificial killing as a way to bring peace and forgiveness. The end goal was not peace because the way was peace. The cross was no different than the noose, electric chair or any other form capital punishment, yet when Jesus dies on it and moves onto resurrection his message of forgiveness and reconciliation without sacrifice is vindicated by God. In doing this he more mysteriously made the threat of death, in the long term, obsolete. Jesus was forgiving, reconciling and loving on God’s behalf thus revealing God the whole time and it culminates in the resurrection. But God is especially displayed on the cross by being faithful to us even while absorbing our sin of coercive violence. God transfigures a symbol of state-sponsored death into a symbol of shalom that can no longer be used to threaten those it rules. And most shockingly he offers the beginning of the resurrected life here and now. This is the actual good news!

God’s good news is for everyone not least the genuine victims behind all our symbols. Like previously said, our symbols of soldiers are meant to be signs of strength and security, but it is a myth with real victims: military personnel, their political national enemies and all casualties. The attempts to hide these victims are becoming more unsuccessful as waves of soldiers return to their homes, on all sides of war, more broken, angry and traumatized than they are proud, strong or justified. The sin of war is the cause of all kinds of human suffering, but Jesus’ life and words from the cross points to the communion table where all are welcome and reconciled and brought back to a borderless fellowship no country can offer. In this sense I think the athletes sitting down for the anthem for the sake of victims stand closer to the message of the cross and the God who is on the side of the victim than the Christians trying to silence them by conflating ideologies of God and country.

                                                                        Note:

[1] Perhaps the first four became important after they stole the land and killed many of its indigenous inhabitants. Also note that the God of Genesis, who called a nomadic people out of the desert and made them the tribe that would welcome and bless all other tribes thereby dismantling tribalism, might have a problem with more ideas of sovereign/autonomous nation-states.

Sodom’s Real Agenda

I want to address how Sodom and Gomorrah is interpreted. The explanation people have most often been given about Sodom was that they were judged for their homosexuality and gay pride parades, or something like that. But, neither the text nor scripture’s “inner-textual” interpreters ever say as such. Following the midrashic wisdom, I advise looking to Abraham to set the standard for the antithetical parallel that Sodom comes to present.

            Prior to God visiting Sodom, there is a scene with Abraham standing under his tent’s entrance to avoid the sun, and in some emblematic sense waiting for God’s promise to come to fruition. Now years before this God made a covenant with Abraham accompanied by the symbolic gestures of giving him a new name (Abram to Abraham: father of lofty to father of many), and the promise of children that will make the name change true. This is then followed by the Ancient Near Eastern act of circumcision which was a serious gesture of commitment by the one believing such a promise (Gen. 17-18 and ouch).

In the years waiting Abraham apparently grows in humility and excessive hospitality. As three strangers come to his tent Abraham’s reflexive action is to run out and greet them in obeisance and asks them to rest, have water and stay for a meal. Then he goes to great lengths by having Sarah get that ready. Okay, he did slaughter a calf for them. Anyway, the three divine messengers oblige him and while conversing one of them tells Abraham that he and Sarah will have a son. If there was doubt about these strangers being divine messengers, the promise of God reiterated should clue us and Abraham in. It is at this that God reveals that Sodom’s and Gomorrah’s injustice was crying out against them which leads to Abraham being in a position to interact with God and tries to barter for not letting their deafness and injustice destroy them ( Gen.18).

But, what is their injustice? The divine messengers walk down to Sodom and are met by Abraham’s nephew Lot who offers them similar hospitality, but he insists on doing it secretly and sending them on their way as soon as possible. The divine messengers said, no, we want to stay in the square, to which Lot strongly insists that coming to his house is the better option. We see why when all males of the city descend onto Lot’s front door. They tell Lot to send the visitors out so that they may “know them” (which in this context is an innuendo for rape) (Gen 19).  According to Ezekiel this is not because Sodom was a bunch of sexual deviants, but because they were prideful, full of wealth, food and prosperity, and still neglected the stranger, poor and disadvantaged (Ezek. 16:49). Joseph Blenkinsopp adds that “according to one midrash the people of Sodom even covered the trees to prevent the birds from eating the berries.”[1] The lack of hospitality was their sin; welcoming the stranger was always central to Jewish faithfulness for following the Creator (Deut. 10:19; Lev. 19:34).

Wes Howard-Brook’s book, Come out my People, adds to this as well. He draws out the two competing religions within the Biblical narrative: YHWH’s “religion of creation” entangled with the rival “religion of empire”, which really took form when Cain builds the first city. Thus, Howard-Brook sees the dynamic at work here with Abraham’s hospitality rooted in peace contrasted with Sodom’s “inhospitable and violent stance deemed ‘normal’ by ancient city dwellers.”[2]

Nevertheless, the crowd was not threatening homosexual supremacy on anyone as if to say “we’re here, we’re queer and it’s contagious!” Though this is how fundamentalists can impose their culture wars onto a text. Rather, the innuendo is threatening rape and rape is always an act (and symbol) of domination. This is the condemnation of the counterfeit society producing the hostile violent fruit bore by ideologies of superiority and self-preservation. Systems like this have nothing to offer the stranger or the vulnerable but pain, suffering and death.

In my mind this interpretation and teaching has so much more to offer us than the faulty reading that has flooded Sunday-schools and sermons. In essence, the reality of Sodom was that they instituted policies and slogans to put Sodom first, built a wall and vetted the stranger so to make Sodom and Sodom's name great again. But, the way of Abraham, which is the way of YHWH, offers us a way out of such engineered cycles through hospitality and shalom for doing life together. And that will bear a much different fruit.

[1] Joseph Blenkinsopp. Ezekiel: Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1990), 79.

[2] Wes Howard-Brook. Come Out My People: God’s Call out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 61.  He also points out that Jesus interprets Sodom and Gomorrah the same way when the cities inhospitably reject his disciples (Matt. 10:15; Lk. 10:12).

The Christian Mystery of Being: For a Philosophical Audience

Andrei Rublev's Trinity Icon

"ἐν αὐτῷ γὰρ ζῶμεν καὶ κινούμεθα καὶ ἐσμέν…" (In God we live and move and are… Acts 17:28).

Perhaps what is going to be central in my thought here is the topic of the God who is love and who is three and yet cannot be contained by the “isness” of existence. Moreover, it is this communion of God’s strange transcendent nearness that is the basis for all that is. We are an age twisted by the work of self-mastery and the need to purge ourselves of mystery by naming, explaining and containing all that can be quantified and worse yet all that cannot. But this would be a mistake and will put us at odds with all that we are to be in relation with, not least our Source of being.

I must begin with a metaphysical look at God. I honestly never gave this much thought until I read D. B. Hart’s essay, The Destiny of Christian Metaphysics, which itself is a defense of Erich Przywara’s, Analogia Entis. In this essay Hart makes the point that God cannot be enumerated as a “divine” or “supreme” being. It is a categorical error of sorts. We Christians affirm that creation comes into existence ex nihilo, so a being which comes from nothing is by its nature coming from a source. So if God is a being, that would mean God has a source from which God came and that source must then contain both God and God’s creation.[1]

But, if we affirm that God is all goodness and truth from which knowledge and being comes from, then God transcends being. Thus we stumble upon the thing, as Hart says, that “no self-sufficient and perfectly systematic metaphysics could ever properly admit into its speculations: the radical contingency and nonnecessity of the created order.[2] In other words, all that “is” is an unnecessary excessive expression of God’s glory.  This is “…the delightful and terrible principle of the creature’s utter groundlessness; it is the realization that we possess no essence, no being, no foundation that is not always, in every moment, imparted to us from beyond ourselves, and that does not therefore always exceed everything that we are in any moment of our existence.”[3]

Stating it this way makes the whole scope of existence a sacred act of God’s incarnation. We are all the word of God being echoed and manifested. The unspeakable present secret is that Paradise, Heaven, the Kingdom of God is all around us and in us and we do not comprehend it. Now I am not attempting to define anything beyond this, but rather it is illuminating our present enigma of “isness” and being within God’s hiddeness that we should never be ready to solve but always in the midst of perceiving, grappling with and even celebrating.

In Andrei Rublev’s Trinity icon (as seen above) we are offered an interesting story of the Trinity in the desert at Abraham's table, but what is most unique to its theology is that there is a fourth place set at the communion table with a rectangular imprint that is believed to be the place where a mirror once set. The point being that the one who saw themselves in its reflection is invited into the infinite communion table of the Trinity. We are not separate from what awakens us and tells us to “be”. God awakens finite being into fellowship of essence and existence that overlaps within the transcendent immediacy of God's eternal Being; that is not to speak of God as a divine being but Being itself. This is where our residence in Life ultimately subsists.  

 [1] David Bentley Hart. The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 20017), 100.

[2] Ibid.99.

[3] Ibid.

A Miracle in Death

Author leaves trail in truth unexplained for those who will catch on not so soon

For the last, the lost, the least, the little, the dying and fishers of no fish

Tells a story of having left virgin womb only to enter virgin tomb

Says to all, this will be the womb you must enter in if 

You are to be born again; enwombed we saturate

In long wait, but when death ate God hell was

Overflowing with heaven; and death

Was made available for

None not

One

Good Friday: Sacrifice Unmasked

San Damiano

Well after unintentionally being a few months out from my last post, here we go!  I have just finished reading Mark Heim’s, Saved from Sacrifice, which works out well as Holy Week is here and I want to discuss some of his relevant ideas. While I will not go into it specifically, Heim spends a decent amount of time setting up, and writing in dialogue with, Rene Girard’s work on the scapegoat for understanding the crucifixion which could be helpful background knowledge for this, but not entirely necessary. 

Recapping Some Things

A few years ago I wrote a post against the Penal Substitution Atonement theory (PSA) and I stood in favor of the Christus Victor (CV) theory (See Here).  If you are not familiar with PSA it is, in short, the idea that Jesus died as the only acceptable sacrifice that would divert God’s angry retributive wrath away from human failure.

Now I still abhor PSA and believe that to say that humanity was both forgiven for our sins and that someone “paid” the debt in full cannot simultaneously be true. However, I do not totally agree with CV anymore either, though it was a necessary progression to get to something more Biblical. PSA is an idea that began with Anselm and found new life with Luther. But, for the first thousand years the church did not have this view of the crucifixion and the Orthodox Church has never claimed this view, so it should raise red flags.

As Tom Wright iterates throughout his recent book, The Day the Revolution Began, PSA falls in line with the pagan religious beliefs in which the community sacrificed human life to appease a retributive deity (like Molech). Now it is not out of line to say that prior to Abraham’s call from YHWH he was part of one of the many cultures that did practice human sacrifice. Yet, God’s cease and desist on taking Isaac’s life (Gen 22:12) reveals that He is different on what faithfulness to Him was going to be.

I believe the church arrived here due to having misunderstood this Abrahamic scene along with a couple of other factors such as: The influence of their own cultural norms and early philosophies of jurisprudence; getting their anthropology of the ancient Jews wrong and thus misinterpreting the Torah, the prophets, the book of Hebrews, Paul’s letters and so on. The bigger problem, however, is that we can never arrive at this view when stories with innocent victims like Abel, Joseph, Job, Daniel and the Gospels are taken seriously. 

Sacrificial Myth

Heim points out that there are many historical myths and symbols in which a demigod of sorts dies and rises for the people. Those myths, however, can neither be read as purely literal or purely fake. This is because people were blind to their sacrificial mechanisms and so create a palatable shrouding from which behind stands a genuine human victim.[1]  Heim says, “In myth no victims are visible as victim, and therefore neither are any persecutors. But with Jesus the victim is unmistakably visible and the collective persecutors (including in the end virtually everyone) and their procedures are illustrated in sharp clarity.”[2] 

            Moreover, in “the Christian account, nowhere more evidently than in the passion, says it took divine intervention, a revelatory act, for us to translate supernatural myths into the actual historical realities behind them. For once God actually was the victim, with the reverse effect of unveiling the humans beneath the symbols.”[3] This completely reframes how we should be viewing the cross but instead we have managed to restructure our theology around the very idea it aims to disarm (i.e. temple theologies of sacrifice).

Heim draws this from the Biblical text. Each of the Gospels offers its own theologies of the crucifixion that are anti-penal. It begins with Jesus forgiving sin without ever offering a sacrifice or becoming a sacrifice first. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (Jn. 1:29).

Jesus putting God’s flagrant forgiveness on display is kind of a regular occurrence (Mt. 6:12; Lk. 7:47-49; Jn. 8:11) but the case of Jesus forgiving the paralytic man gets attention in all of the Synoptics (Mt. 9:19; Mk.2:1-9; Lk. 5:20-23). In this particular scene we have Jesus’ forgiveness being challenged by the scribes: “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”(Mk.2:7). It is not that God cannot entrust reconciliation for someone via another person, but when there is absence of a presiding priest, temple ceremony and sacrifice, Jesus is thus assuming God’s place, or at least claiming to know God’s position on the matter, namely in regards to what God’s necessary requirements for reconciliation are. In this case Jesus seems to be saying, short of facing our failure there are no requirements because grace was always central to God’s dealing with us and healing in us.

If you forgive anyone their sins they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness it is withheld (Jn. 20:23). Forgiveness then is quintessentially a display of God’s character. “Go learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Matt. 9:13).  Here Jesus is referencing Hosea 6:6, (and possibly Psalms 50:8-14, 51:16-17, Micah 6:7-8) and setting the stage for followers of God to move forward with life and bring peace and reconciliation in a way that does not come at the cost of another. Yet, it simultaneously is calling out the sacrificial system. As Heim says, “In the Bible when the story of redemptive violence is finally told from the viewpoint of the victim it is told as a sinful human construct for peacemaking, not a divine institution. Jesus reveals that God is not the author of the process, but the one crushed by it.”[4]

Who Asks For Blood?

This brings us again to the point that the Gospels are anti-penal. If Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice to appease a wrathful deity, then why is everyone involved in his demise seen as the evil doers and betrayers? Are they not doing a needed sacrificial act? Like Caiaphas says, better for one man to die than to let an entire nation perish (Jn.11:50), right? Except the accusers in Jesus’ parable of the “evil tenants” are unmasked. The story is centered on those symbolic tenants (scribes, Pharisees and previous royal orders) who torture and/or kill all the workers (prophets) that the king (God) had sent, but at last he sends his beloved son who they think just needs to be bumped off in order for them to steal the very inheritance that they have been unfaithful tenants of (Mark 12:1-12). Sequentially, they make plans with Judas by buying him off to find a moment for them to secretly arrest Jesus, but in Luke it goes further to say that Judas is doing the work of Satan (Lk.22:1-6). I do not need to explain the critical light this is casting.

But, from the cross the words of forgiveness, not vengeance, ring out (Lk.23:34). Make no mistake; the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world and breaks the sting of death in the process, but it has nothing to do with taking God’s wrath off of us. Rather it has everything to do with the coalescing of all the sin that led to “sacred violence” past, present and future and broke it. As Heim says better than I can:

The sacrificing of Jesus was the work of sin, but the overcoming of that scapegoat death is the work of God. Sacrifice is the game the powers of this world were playing with Jesus, and apparently winning according to the old rules. God’s victory broke the hold of this game itself, ‘made captivity itself a captive’ (Eph. 4:8). Such images dramatically affirm that God has defeated scapegoating death and returned to claim that site of violence, the cross, as a throne. It is out of commission for the execution business and ruled by another power.[5]

In this we ourselves become forgiven not bought, rescued not legally defended, loved not proven worthy because life is not a worthiness contest, but it is a gift that any good Creator would want Her/His creation to thrive in. The Gospel is the good news that God will forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors so we can learn to reconcile without killing something, Tikkun Olam! 

[1] S. Mark Heim. Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2006), 111.

[2] Ibid, 114.

[3] Ibid, 122.

[4] Ibid, 17.

[5] Ibid, 310.