Radical Christianity - Anabaptists & anarchy

The connections between radical Christianity in its Anabaptist form and a christian anarchy have not received a lot of attention but really come to focus in the life and writings of the southern Baptist activist and theologian Will Campbell. Christians uneasy with institutional church structures might find themselves both encouraged and disturbed by him. I'll try and use this blog as a work in progress.

What if the Church were Christian?

What if the Church were Christian? A question asked most pointedly by the leader writer for The Independent newspaper in Britain contemplating the debates at the General Synod of the Church of England.

The leader writer closed the editorial with the observation that:

The Church ought to stand as a sign of contradiction in a consumerist culture whose focus constantly and unquestioningly narrows on ever-greater individualism and self-interest. But where it ignores the lessons which secular society has to teach it about its own gospel message, and does so with such shrill intolerance, it has only itself to blame if the rest of us dismiss it as a foolish pageant.
(c) Independent 2010

Simon Barrow framed his observations with reference to the following quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

"Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear ... Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Kevin Rudd, Christian faith and the 2007 Federal election

Apparently, the Christian vote played a decisive role in Kevin Rudd's election victory last year. Pentecostal and evangelical Christians proved to be the all-important swinging voters in a string of key seats, many of them in Queensland.

At least that's the finding in research on the 2007 election, carried out by John Black, a former Labor Senator for Queensland, who runs a research and marketing company called Australian Development Strategies.

The religious factor wasn't so much a general swing across the whole of the electorate, it showed up in key electorates that Labor needed to win, and did win. In fact religious identity, specifically Pentecostals and Lutherans remained significant in the analysis of significant factors in swings to the Australian Labor Party in Queensland.

The attraction to Kevin Rudd and the vote for the Labor Party may not have been based simply on Rudd's personal appeal to the conservative religious voter, but about what's been going on theologically in those religious communities.

There are shifts and differentiation within those communities that simply arent picked in sweeping comments that align conservative Christianity with "Religious right" politics.

Religious commentator and ABC broadcaster John Cleary participating in the discussion on the Religion Report observed that the Religious Right had opened faith communities up to re-engagement with civil society over the past twenty years. However, now that those evangelical communities and Pentecostal communities are re-engaged with civil society, they are moving to a wider agenda becoming actively involved for example with Micah Challenge and the Make Poverty History Campaign. Theologically they have been recovering their evangelical heritage that goes back to the progressivism of the 19th century.

Kevin Rudd has made the link directly in appealing to a whole younger generation in these churches, being very influenced over the last 20 years by evangelists like Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis on the Christian Left in the United States. In Rudd's essay, published in The Monthly in October 2006 on faith in politics, in the first three paragraphs of that essay, largely devoted to Dietrich Bonhoeffer he quotes Jim Wallis, the author of 'God's Politics', the bestseller in evangelical churches over the last two years appealing to a whole generation of young people in those evangelical churches.

I reckon this analysis over eggs the pudding a bit, but there is no doubt that both Black and Cleary are on to something that I have picked up in my own discussions with friends cnnected to the Pentecostal community.

For the full transcript of the discussion see The Religion Report - 19 March 2008 - The Christian vote in Australian federal politics
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2008/2194469.htm

Christianity and Radical Democracy

This is a most amazing and rewarding book.

Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian By Stanley Hauerwas & Romand Coles Cascade Books, 2008

The title talks about conversations and the book really delivers - in a series of lectures, papers and letters in which Stanley Hauerwas, written off as sectarian by many mainstream theologians, engages in a probing exploration with Roman Coles, a political theorist, non-believer and community activist of the possible connections between a radical Christian faith and radical democracy.

This is a challenging exchange that demonstrates an open listening and honest exploration of points of connection and question between the traditions.

I learnt much from Coles sympathetic and open reading of texts from Rowan Williams and Jean Vanier and his sharp eye for the intrusion of Christendom assumptions and languages into our best efforts to get beyond a Christendom mentality. What do they have to do with organising for radical democracy? Go read.

This probing exchange reveals an emerging friendship that does not arrive at any easy synthesis or collapse the tension between the faith commitments of Hauerwas and the political commitments of Coles.

What is important is that they are both talking about a reimagining of politics and the practices that would sustain the practice of a radical politics and both questioning the contemporary shape of political imagination that is shaped by both the denial and the production of death.

Coming into view here are the practices of the early civil rights movement exemplified in the work of Bob Moses and Ella Baker, the local community organising of the Industrial Areas Foundation and the life and worship of the L'Arche communities. In the background is the work of John Howard Yoder, Mennonite theologian and his articulation of what Coles terms a "wild patience".

Godot, Sarajevo and the radical Christian tradition

I have been rereading, for reasons i am not quite clear about, David Toole's challenging reading of philosophy and politics Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo. (Radical Traditions, SCM Press, 1998) The subtitle, "Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy and Apocalypse" puts it into a context where it will likely be ignored by everybody.

Toole on reflection catches me in the opening paragraphs of his preface where he suggests that events in Sarajevo in 1914 marked the real beginning of the twentieth century and in 1992 we reached the end of that century with a further hofrrific outburst of war and genocide in the Balkans.

The book that follows is a reading of Nietzsche, Foucault and the theologians, Milbank and Yoder. This is demanding reading that is academically responsible, not cheap rationalistic Christian apologetics but seriously engaging with the deep themes that these thinkers raise.

Toole explores nihilism, the politics of tragedy and the apolcalyptic politics of John Howard Yoder (the peace church theologian) and the connections between these themes.

Toole is caught between a rock and a hard place. Many Christians of both liberal and fundamentalist persuasion will not take the trouble to go with him into the depths and return via an engaged Christian orthodoxy. Many academics will wonder why he wants to bring theology into the argument.

(Which reminds me of why I get annoyed by media interviews with John Shelby Spong - his presentation seems to suggest that if you do not accept his liberal version of Christianity your only choice is to be a fundamentalist. The radical tradition of Christian intellectual and political engagement gets totally ignored. For an accessible account of a recent trajectory of radical Christianity se Robert Inchausti Subversive orthodoxy: Outlas, Revolutionaries and other Christians in Disguise Brazos Press, 2005)

Toole's reading of Foucault on "apparatus" (p.172-173) opened up questions for me about a connection with Jacques Ellul on "technique" and opened up possible connections with issues of Christian witness and martyrdom in his discssion of physical resistance (pp.186-187).