Children of Adoption

11 05 2012

Adoption is beautiful.

I have a number of friends going through the process right now – from those waiting for notice that they are going to be parents, to those waiting to receive their child, to those who have recently returned home with their family now numbering three (as opposed to two).

Of course, I personally don’t know anything about adoption. My parents did not adopt me nor did my wife and I adopt our daughter. But following the progress of my friends’ adoption process is entirely absorbing. Seeing their deep love for these children whom they have yet to meet, is stunning. They expend huge amounts of money and time in preparing their dossiers, securing the proper legal forms and permissions, purchasing flights (if the child is far away) and otherwise being put though the emotional wringer. And here’s the real kicker, they do this knowing full well that, even if everything goes as well as possible, these children will try their patience, exasperate them, and maybe even hurt them – emotionally or physically…because they are just like every other child. That’s love.

I want to affirm these friends in the strongest possible way: in undertaking the process of adoption they participate in the work of God. Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood: I don’t want to perpetuate the image of the helpless-child-rescued-by-the-beneficent-saviors. I don’t think that an adopted child owes their parents any more gratitude and appreciation than a biological child. Nevertheless, caring for those who cannot care for themselves is part of what the New Testament author of James called “pure and undefiled religion” (1:27). And, further, adoption is precisely the language the Bible uses for the Christian’s relation to God.

First, according to the apostle Paul, the people of Israel were adopted by God (Roman 9:4). According to some scholars, the decisive act of adoption occurred in the Exodus, when God brought his “firstborn” (Exodus 4:22-23) out of
 servitude and into freedom. Importantly, however, this freedom was not one of autonomy but one of theonomy (for those who know their Greek word roots), or better, one of freedom in relationship with God. Of course, this relationship was not always flawless. As the majority of the Old Testament attests, Israel caused God much pain.

Second, Paul states that Christians have received “the Spirit of adoption” (Romans 8:15) which makes us God’s children (Galatians 4:5). This “Spirit of adoption”, which Paul significantly contrasts with a Spirit of slavery in reference to the Exodus, is also one of relation with God to whom Christians can cry out as a child to their father (Romans 8:15). For Paul, adoption by God is a moment of redemption, the promise of new life and renewed relationship with God.

While the analogy between the New Testament adoption imagery and the adoption process my friends are going though is not perfect, there is a significant connection. In both cases adoption brings a child in need into a nurturing relationship. In both cases, adoption brings with it the promise of pain. In both cases, one factor far out-weighs all others: unconditional parental love.

Ben Edsall


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

There’s one born every minute…

13 04 2012

Jesus was a sucker. Hear me out.

According to the Gospel of Matthew he said “Give to everyone to asks and do not refuse the one who wants to borrow from you.”[1] If one were actually to try this, they would soon find that they no longer had anything to give away! Indeed, in the post-Derrida and Post-Levinas time in which we live, the “impossibility” of the “pure” gift or “pure” hospitality is commonplace. In fact, these more recent philosophers were preempted by a couple thousand years since the author of the Didache, an early Christian document from around the turn of the first century CE, already instructed readers to “let your alms sweat in your hands, until you know to whom you should give” (Did. 1:6). That is, charity is important, but you should hold on tightly to your contribution until the object of charity has been evaluated.

But me, I’m not a sucker; I’m an expert. And thanks to the internet, I can become so with almost no effort and no real understanding of the issues involved. The flip-side of being an expert is, of course, being a critic. Kierkegaard, in The Present Age, scathingly characterized his contemporaries as “reflective” rather than brave or noble. They were those who, on reflection, could criticize the hero and convince themselves that such deeds are better left undone. Sadly, we don’t even live in a reflective age anymore. Ours is the age of the knee-jerk reaction; the age of unsupported criticism by “experts” who don’t understand.

This was recently driven home to me again when the Invisible Children put out their Kony 2012 video. Some who genuinely understood the situation criticized factual inaccuracies and political oversimplification, but an alarming number didn’t and instead cried “government conspiracy” or attacked the character of those who were trying to help.[2] I even learned a new word, “sheeple.” Apparently, anyone who is persuaded or inspired by anyone else about anything is in danger of being a “sheeple.”

Criticism has become our self-defense. It is our way to prove that we are not suckers, that we are our own masters (or mistresses). But to have such a posture as the default raises its own problems. We lose the ability to evaluate an idea for what is good in it. We lose the ability to be inspired. We lose the ability to attempt the heroic. And we lose generosity towards other people both in the way that we interact with their ideas (often manifested in ad hominem attacks) and the way in which we respond to their requests for help.

In our critical age, Jesus seems unbelievably naïve. But, so what? Maybe he was on to something that we, in our current social and political context, are unable to grasp. Maybe what the world needs is more suckers to give to all who ask.[3]

Ben Edsall
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[1] Matthew 5:42 (and similarly Luke 6:30). The term “borrow” (δανείζω) is often used in the sense of lending out with interest (as in Plato’s Laws 742C). In context I am inclined to shade the meaning away from technical financial language (similar to the use of the same term in the Greek of Deut 15:8-10) but, if it does have the technical sense, Jesus’ statement has interesting implications for financial institutions, especially in light of other biblical injunctions such as returning a person’s collateral should they need it to survive (Deut 24:13).
[2] This is true even though their proposed help was not without problems. For an insightful response to the Kony 2012 developments, see this piece at Time.
[3] I’d like to head off certain criticisms at the start, here. I am not trying to argue that systemic injustice ought to be ignored or that more holistic ways of helping those in need (through rehabilitation, micro-business, etc.) are not valuable. They are crucial. But they are also a function of our initial impulse to help rather than to criticize.


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

A tale of murder and woe…or something

26 12 2011

I’d like to take this time to draw all of your attention to a tragedy that happens every day right before our eyes: verbicide, “the murder of a word.”[1] Each day, thousands of words are cut down thoughtlessly in a number of ways.

Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for ‘very’, tremendous for ‘great’, sadism for ‘cruelty’, and unthinkable for ‘undesirable’ were verbicides.… But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them.”[2]

To Lewis’ list of verbicides, today we could add the whole i.m.-dialect (brb, lol, wtf), which is in my opinion the death of the English language. However, the most poignant point is, I think, the one about approval and disapproval.

My wife recently heard a man tell a story in which he got into a discussion with someone over what a family is. Our protagonist remarked, “It quickly became clear that we did not see eye to eye on the matter.” He went on to claim that he supported what he saw as the bible’s definition of a “family” as “a husband and wife and their children.” I think it is good that my wife didn’t have any heavy objects to hand or his story might have ended more abruptly.

Why the ire, you ask? Perhaps it’s partially hormones…she is eight months pregnant, after all. But I think the dominant cause for her anger is the fact that such a definition is deliberately exclusive, and as such, potentially harmful to those who do not fit this man’s “family mold.”

In the first place, that simply is not the definition of a family anywhere in the Bible. In fact, if someone can find a definition of “family” in the Bible, they’ll win a prize. (Not really. I’m not giving out prizes.) Furthermore, such a definition of family is patently inaccurate. If that man were (God forbid) to die in a car wreck, leaving his wife as a single mother, surely he would not hesitate to call them a family. Or, what if he and his wife both passed away and his children went to live with their grandparents or an aunt or uncle? What would they be if not a family? How does such a narrow definition relate his wife to his parents or him to his in-laws? Are they not family? How do adopted children fit into this scenario? What if a single parent adopts a child? His definition is certainly not the operable definition with which most people work on a daily basis. At least, I don’t think so. All this and we haven’t even considered this from the angle of non-western cultures without the myopic focus on the nuclear family.

To explain such an obviously deficient definition, we would do well to turn to Lewis again.

“The phenomenon ceases to be puzzling only when we realize that it is a tactical definition. The pretty word [in our case, family] has to be narrowed ad hoc so as to exclude something he dislikes.” [3]

When a person bothers to define a common word,

“The fact that they define it at all is itself a ground for scepticism. Unless we are writing a dictionary, or a text-book of some technical subject, we define our words only because we are in some measure departing from their real current sense, otherwise there would be no purpose in doing so.”[4]

Interestingly, although he considered himself a defender of ‘the Bible’s definition of family’, this man’s definition also excludes Jesus and his “family.” According to the New Testament Gospels, Jesus was born to an unwed, teenage girl and entrusted to the care of a man with no blood relation at all. I think that’s a bit ironic.

In close, I simply want to say that we, from whatever walk of life we may come, need to be very careful in the way that we define our words. Defining words to show approval and disapproval does not aid in effective communication (in any sense of the word) and, further, can have consequences far beyond what we intend. As Lewis, again, said, “We cannot stop the verbicides. The most we can do is not to imitate them.” [5]

Ben Edsall
________________
[1] C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 7.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, 19.
[4] Ibid, 18.
[5] Ibid, 132.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Rootedness in a Transient World

30 11 2011

In the six and a half years that I have been married, we have moved seven times. Eight for me if you count moving in with my wife when we first got married. Throughout my life (and including my various undergraduate moves) I have moved house roughly eighteen times. It almost feels as if I’ve become nomadic, moving with my food source…of course the “food source” in this analogy refers to various degree programs and the search for cheap housing (but not cheap housing, if you know what I mean).

On top of changing houses, my wife and I have been in three different countries on two different continents in the last few years. And, given that my current program only lasts about another year and a half, another move is looming – perhaps another drastic one. I might as well be in the military. (Okay, I know that I wouldn’t do well in the military, but you get the point.)

What I long for at this point is a place, somewhere I can settle down with my family where we can become stable members of the community. Or, from another angle, I want rest: rest from the upheaval that comes with moving, rest from the effort that entering a new community requires, rest from feeling torn between where I was and where I am.

Of course, as I mentioned, I don’t see this coming my way any time soon. And, if I’m honest with myself, this sort of settled rest may well make me unhappy in other ways, such as feeling guilty for having too much. I find myself drawn to Jesus’ declaration to some would-be followers, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man [=Jesus] has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20; Luke 9:58). Still, the longing for place and rest persists, whatever objections I may raise. In this way, I am not alone.

The Bible (in both the Old and New Testament) recognizes this need for place and rest. However, it also affirms the elusive quality of these things in the here and now. One place where these themes are clearly brought out is in the book of Hebrews (one of the lesser read books in the New Testament).

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.  By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents” (Hebrews 11:8-9a).

Earlier, the author discusses the entry of the Israelites into the promised land under Joshua in terms of rest. Joshua, he claims, did not ultimately lead the Israelites into rest (as the book of Judges abundantly illustrates) but rather the rest was still to come (Hebrews 4:8).

For the the New Testament generally, true place and rest will come, but only with the end, when the earth is made new and we dwell with God in his city. As Hebrews says about Abraham, “he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10).

So, yes, we may long for true place and rest, but this longing will not always be frustrated. The New Testament holds out this hope to us in the hands of Jesus Christ.

Ben Edsall


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Eloquent Silence

9 11 2011

“Shimon, the son of Gamaliel, says, ‘All my days I have grown up  in the midst of the sages [or wise men] and I have not found anything that is good for a person except silence” (Avot 1:16[17])

Shimon actually goes on to say that “anyone who multiplies words brings on sin.”  I do find it slightly ironic (and quite funny to boot) that the son of the very famous Rabban Gamaliel (who, incidentally, may have been the teacher of the Apostle Paul) has such seemingly negative things to say about talking.  I wonder if he ever brought this up in conversation with all those sages or if he just sat apart from the circle wishing they would let him go hang out with his friends.

Poor attempts at humor aside, there is something very valuable and timely in Shimon’s statement.  Silence is something of a scarcity in today’s western culture.  For the majority of most of our lives we are within easy earshot of traffic of some sort.  There is construction noise in our perennially-renovated cities.  Airplanes fly overhead, dogs bark, phones ring (and sing and chime and beep, etc.), and––the absolute top on my list of worst noises ever––car alarms blare the fact that a squirrel has just scampered across the hood.  To drown all this out we turn on music, watch TV, put in headphones and just generally surround ourselves with other noise.  In fact, there is a whole industry for “white noise” that is an attempt to surround oneself with sound that is less jarring and offensive than the noise of the world around us.  We are inundated by noise.

If you are anything like me, this noise is very distracting.  (I am definitely one of the multitude in the library with earphones in trying to alleviate the aural chaos with some controlled musical input of my own.)  One side effect of all the noise, is that the physical assault on our eardrums carries with it a sort of social noise as well.  We are flooded by our “entertainment” media with news of pop stars and celebrities, the latest gadgets, new trends in fashion, and a million other things that promise to make us the person that they tell us we want to be.  As I noted in a previous post, the messages received here can cause us to become dissatisfied with our lives as they are; indeed, many of the messages are designed to do just that.

In this culture of noise, the words of Shimon ben Gamaliel are a clarion call for something different. [1]  It is good for a person to have silence: silence from our noises and silence from the messages our noises bring.  This gives us a space to separate ourselves from the compulsions of our society, if only for a moment, to reflect, to pray and to reconnect with our creator.  When God spoke to Elijah in the wilderness (1 Kings 19:9-18), there was great and strong wind, an earthquake and fire (large, noise producing events), and what does it say? “The Lord was not in the wind”––a fact stated again with respect to the earthquake and fire.  Instead, God spoke to Elijah in the subsequent silence.  Perhaps we ought to find some silence of our own, going to a “wilderness” (where the consuming noise of our society cannot fill our senses) thus making space for another voice entirely.

Ben Edsall
_______________________________

[1]  I should probably note that this post is a free reflection on the value of silence rather than an exegesis of Shimon ben Gamaliel’s saying.  Avot 1:16[17] is more concerned to emphasize the value of performance of the commandments than to advocate silence in the midst of this modern and aurally inundated society: “Study [of the commandments] is not the root but rather doing them.”


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

On Testimony and History

28 10 2011

In an earlier post I suggested that, when comparing different religions with Christianity, one must take seriously the centrality of the person of Jesus. That means, rather than starting with ethics or metaphysics, comparisons of Christianity should start with Christ. (Admittedly, this is not an original idea.) What this means in practice, however, is that one has to begin with history. Whatever else we may conclude about Jesus, he was also a first century Jewish man living and working in Palestine (the Roman provinces of Galilee and Judaea).

But what can we really know about Jesus? The New Testament contains four different Gospels (referred to as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John after their traditional authors), which are accounts of the life and work of Jesus, with particular interest in his ministry, and death in the early 30′s CE. (Jesus’ death is particularly important for these authors because according to them [and the earlier writer Paul as well] death was not the end for Jesus – he rose and now reigns as lord over all.)  All four are different, with different points of view on various events and controversies, though three of them are closely related and share a number of sources (though the precise connection has been debated since antiquity and doesn’t look like it’s letting up any time soon). They (or parts of them) were probably written sometime from ten years after Jesus’ death to the end of the first century or perhaps beginning of the second century CE. These facts have led some to ask, “Can we really trust these accounts of Jesus?”

I would like to suggest that we can and that the case of the gospels is not really different in principle from any other historical text. Historical events and persons are not subject to proof, i.e. they are not verifiable, in the same way that contemporary events are and certainly not in the same way that one proves a mathematical or scientific hypothesis. But even contemporary events are difficult to understand. If three people witness the same event, say, a convenience store robbery, it is unlikely that their descriptions will be the same. Each has their own point of view, and it is further affected by their relationship to, in our example, the robber: the store owner’s account would likely be very different from the account of the doting mother who happened to be there. In reconstructing the event, the police rely on human testimony (even alongside such fancy technology as a security camera) to understand what happened.

Working with events and persons in history is even more complicated than that, but the crux remains the same: do you trust the one giving the testimony? If not, then it is unlikely that even a very plausible event would be accepted. If so, then even some difficulties in the testimony might be allowed within the limits of that trust. But all history, and indeed most knowledge about anything, is based on one sort of testimony or another. The historian’s job is to weigh the various accounts of an event and decide what is coherent and what does not fit.[1] The Gospels (along with the whole New Testament) testify that Jesus was more than he seemed. He was the Messiah of the Jews, who was also the very presence of God among his people. This Jesus, as Paul testifies with the Gospels, “died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”[2]

This is what they testify. The question is, do you trust them?

Ben Edsall
______________________
[1] Of course, we bring our own presuppositions to the table too, but that is a matter for a different post.
[2] 1 Corinthians 15:3-4


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Categories : Tough Questions

The Problem with Christians

30 09 2011

What is wrong with Christians, anyway?

I was minding my own business, perhaps only marginally paying attention, when the professor in my undergraduate Philosophy or Religion class decided to pair us up to discuss religious practice. (At least, I think that’s what we were supposed to discuss, but I already told you that I wasn’t paying attention.)

I scooted my desk closer to a few fellow students and we began to talk. In the middle of our discussion, one student responded to some comment I made – about the Christian actions being reasonable (which of course they are…to me, as an insider) – with the exclamation, “Oh yeah? Then why are Baptists so weird?!”

Unfortunately, I don’t know what specifically gave rise to this comment but, having grown up in the Baptist denomination (a sub-group of Protestantism, if you’re curious), I can indeed confirm that Baptists are weird. Also, having travelled a bit now and having been a part of a number of other churches, I can also say with some authority that Baptists hardly have the monopoly on weird. Every denomination has its own idiosyncrasies which, of course, only appear to be so because I am coming from the “outside” position of growing up in a different tradition. These differences range from the minor (e.g., whether or not one raises one’s hands while praying and singing) to the more significant (like the Appalachian snake handlers…personally, I hate snakes; me and Indiana Jones).

However, these things don’t even begin to answer the real question, which I think was probably behind my colleague’s exclamation: What is wrong with Christians? For example, how can we think of ourselves so highly and yet, at times, treat others so poorly? Or another: how can we hold such high moral standards for others and then consistently fail to meet them?

Fair questions. Perhaps they have crossed your mind too. The answer to these questions, however, and to the less serious complaint about Baptists is a simple one: Christians are human beings. Being human means that we are fallible, weak, broken and in need of a savior. Whatever we want to be like, we are not there. Importantly, the problem with Christians is the problem with everyone else too. Paul tells us in his letter to the Roman Christians that we are all broken – everyone alike – and therefore we all need a savior (Romans 3:23). Paul (among others) also tells us that such a savior has indeed been given to us in the person of Jesus, who was crucified, and was raised to reconcile us to God.

Accordingly, Christians, like everyone else, still do bad things, make mistakes and are full of human frailty. While this doesn’t excuse or exonerate us – indeed, an important task for Christianity today is repentance (both collectively and individually) – our failures don’t alter the truth of Jesus’ saving death or resurrection. The fact that he uses broken people to bear his message is simply another example of his love – that he would involve broken people in his redemptive plan for all creation.

Ben Edsall


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Categories : Tough Questions

Translating Jesus

2 09 2011

As a student of ancient texts, I often find myself faced with translational difficulties. There is an important thing one learns early on in working with more than one language: there is no such thing as a perfect translation. In fact, this point is so well known that the Italians have a famous saying for it – ‘traduttore è traditore’, the translator is a traitor. In every translation, some aspects of the original are preserved, others are lost, and new elements are introduced.

Here’s an example. When the Jews decided to translate their Hebrew Bible into Greek around the 2nd century BCE, they had to make some tough choices. For instance, when they wanted to translate the word for city (hā (îr), they chose the common Greek term polis. However, while it was certainly the obvious choice, the term polis carried particular political and cultural baggage that the Hebrew term did not. Or another one: at the beginning of the Gospel of John there is the term logos (‘in the beginning was the logos‘) which can mean ‘word’, ‘account’, ‘story’, ‘plan’, ‘argument’ and more. However, there is no term in the English language that captures the various aspects of the Greek logos. The only perfect translation is a tautology: logos means logos.

Importantly, translation doesn’t only happen at the lexical level. On the most general level, translation consists in speaking about one thing (or group of things) in other terms. Any specialist in most fields will find themselves translating their technical jargon into everyday terms in an effort to converse with the layman. Adults translate for children on a daily basis.  And in all these situations, something is retained in the translation and something is lost. Further, the translator is always in danger of choosing a word that carries the wrong social or cultural baggage, regardless of technical lexical definition.

Translation also occurs when people from religious traditions try to find common ground. In the highly mobile Mediterranean antiquity, Greeks, Egyptians, Romans and others found themselves trying to figure out how their various religious systems fit together. If Zeus was the father of all humans and Gods, as Homer maintained (Iliad 1.544), how did this fit with the Roman claims about Jupiter?[1] Their answer? Zeus and Jupiter were two names for the same thing. When Greeks and Romans came into contact with the Jews, some of them tried to incorporate their religious system into their own.[2] However, while change is less noticeable between Zeus and Jupiter since both fit within a polytheistic pantheon, one can hardly fit the Jewish God, YHWH, into a Greek pantheon without totally altering one’s view of him. For the Jews, YHWH was the only true and living God and as such cannot be himself among a pantheon.

Such translational difficulties abound today. A large part of religious studies consists of ‘translating’ one religion into terms that also fit others, or as one of my professors liked to put it, explaining religion in such a way that no religious person could ever agree to it. It is true that translational common ground can be found between Christianity and other religions. In the realm of ethics for example, Christianity shares a number of concerns with Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and others. It does not have a monopoly on philosophical defenses of God. In general terms, it shares a cosmology with a number of religions.

But there is one thing that simply does not translate, and that one thing is a person: Jesus. A man who was fully human (and Jewish to be precise) but was also in some mysterious way the God of Israel who had come to be among his people. There is no equivalent person to Jesus in any other religious system. He cannot be translated into Buddha, Mohammed or Moses, because he is simply a different person. So when one is tempted to think that all religions are the same, look for those elements that resist translation. Examine religions not only for what is common, though those points are also very important, but also for what is uncommon. For Christianity, Jesus is that uncommon person who stands at the center of everything.

Ben Edsall

____________

[1] Plato (Timaeus 28C) and Epictetus (Diss. 1.3.1) also claimed that ‘God’ was the creator or father of gods and humanity.

[2] A famous example of this is Plutarch’s discussion of who the God of the Jew is (Quaestiones Conviviales 6 [671C-672C]).


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On Missions, Missionaries, and Proselytizing

5 08 2011

Again, if God, like Jupiter in the comedy, should, on awaking from a lengthened slumber, desire to rescue the human race from evil, why did He send this Spirit of which you speak into one corner (of the earth)? He ought to have breathed it alike into many bodies, and have sent them out into all the world.[1]

The above quotation is from one of Christianity’s earliest and most stringent critics, the 2nd century philosopher named Celsus. His irritation with Christianity is more than evident here: how could such a backwater sect make claims to revelation of universal importance?  Such claims were only more audacious in Celsus’ eyes because he considered Christianity to be composed entirely of anti-intellectual simpletons who preyed on the weak.[2] I’m not sure some of Christianity’s contemporary critics have moved away this position.

In fact, the notion that one group of people can claim to be the sole possessors of an important universal truth has remained odious in the eyes of those on the outside of that group and, if anything, has only increased as our society becomes more diverse and so many religious and cultural traditions live, quite literally, side by side. How arrogant, some exclaim, does someone need to be to claim that they have the absolute truth about God and reality. Christian missionaries are regularly portrayed in a negative light, with critics pointing out the fact that cultural triumphalism and imperial motivations often accompanied European missionaries in the early modern period. Indeed, the many stories of disastrous “missions” to South and Central America that involved the Conquistadors are well known and terribly sad. One might also mention heinous acts like the forced “Christianization” (which really just meant “Westernization”) of Aboriginals in Australia or Native Americans in North America. All these things are true, and they are truly heartbreaking.

However, even when mistakes and atrocities are admitted and we Christians backpedal as fast as possible from arrogant presentations of our religious views, it remains the case that Christianity is, at its root, a missionary religion. In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus says to his disciples “Go and make disciples of all nations.” The earliest Christian writings that we have come from a pioneering missionary and pastor, Paul the Apostle. Within about 300 years or so of its founding, Christianity spread from provincial Judaea to become the national religion of Rome, the world power at the time, thanks to a controversial move by Emperor Constantine. It soon spread from Rome to the various tribal groups in Western Europe and, by the time Islam arose in the 7th century, Christianity stretched from Ireland, down into Africa, to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond.

In more recent times, some Christian groups have tried to formulate a more nuanced and charitable position towards other religious views. For example, some propose the idea that people might be “Christians” without really knowing it.[3] Such efforts at charitable inter-religious dialogue are a relatively recent phenomenon, though I certainly think they are good. However, as offensive as it might seem to those who are not Christians, it remains the case that Christianity proclaims that there was a certain Jewish man named Jesus who was more than he seemed: he was the one God himself who condescended to become human with us in order to save us from ourselves, death, and destruction. It declares that God is the only living and true God [4] and that being “in Christ” is the only way to be reconciled with God in spite of our sinful nature.[5]

Be that as it may, to anyone reading this who are not Christians, please know that even if you find it absurd that some person you meet tries to share their Christian beliefs with you, it is done because they care about you.[6] As comedian Penn Jillette, an avowed atheist, asked, “how much do you have hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible, and not tell them that.” If anything, take your friend’s proselytizing efforts as a sign of affection, they love you enough to share the source of all love with you.

Ben Edsall
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[1] Quoted by Origen in Contra Celsum 6.78. A handy set of excerpts containing Celsus’ comments can be found here.
[2] See Origen’s Contra Celsum 3.44, 55, 59, etc.
[3] This has cropped up, for example, is such different places as the (Catholic) Vatican II council and in (Protestant) C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series.
[4] See for example 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10.
[5] See John 15:1-5. Of course, this blog post is a highly compressed account and precisely what it means to be “in Christ” is difficult to define.
[6] I admit that sometimes this is not the case and that people present Christianity in order to bolster their own pride or feel good about themselves. I don’t condone this but I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, hence my positive account here.


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Categories : Tough Questions

“You have to learn how to die”

8 07 2011

How can one fight to produce peace? How can one win a war without causing more wars in the future? These questions hit me, as funny as it may be, while I was listening to a song by Wilco recently. I had probably listened to this song about 20 times before the significance of these lines hit me, which doesn’t say much for my intelligence, as these are almost the only words in the whole song.

Anyway, the lines that grabbed me came from their 2002 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot:

…It’s a war on war, it’s a war on war
It’s a war on war, there’s a war on war.
You’re gonna lose, you have to lose
You have to learn how to die… (from “War on War”)

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on December 10, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the same issue. He famously said “nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.” [1] He went on to claim, I think rightly, that the foundation of such a nonviolent response is love.

In the immediate context of the African-American struggle for Civil Rights in the USA this meant that “The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites…It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.” [2] Violence, as a method to achieve this liberation, is ineffective and immoral because it creates a vicious cycle that thrives on hatred rather than love, destroys community and reduces dialogue to monologue, or in other words, “it seeks to annihilate rather than convert.”

I’d like to side-step the contemporary socio-political implications of such a view, although I think they are significant. Instead, I’d like to reflect briefly on an early proponent of this non-violent ethic: Jesus. In his famous Sermon on the Mount he says things like “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.”[3] This self-giving for the “other,” even those “others” who do not seem deserving, is a radical position but it is this response that has the potential to give life to both parties. Significantly though, Jesus didn’t just preach this, he lived it and, indeed, died it.

Collectively, we humans are indeed a violent and oppressive people. The Bible testifies to the fact that the world and people today are broken…if we needed any evidence for this outside of our own experience.  How could God overcome our oppression and violence without resorting to (and propagating) violence and oppression? How could God reconcile the broken world to himself in a way that maintained dialogue and thrived on love?

He had to learn how to die. And that is precisely what he did. In the person of Jesus, God became human and died to free us from such vicious cycles of brokenness. In addition to the metaphysical aspects of sin and redemption, Jesus also serves as our example, the paradigm of how we are to love others so much that we die for them, giving ourselves for others rather than forcing others to give themselves for us.

It is a war on war, at least insofar as war is the culmination of human brokenness. As Wilco said “you have to learn how to die if you wanna, wanna be alive.” I think Jesus agrees.

Ben Edsall
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[1] The text and recordings of MLK Jr.’s two Nobel Prize speeches can be found at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/.
[2] This quote and the point below are made in MLK Jr.’s Nobel Prize lecture on Dec. 11, 1964.
[3] Matthew 5:38-41


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