'Doing' theology today

Nicholas Lash has an excellent account of what doing theology means today in his series of lecture  Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God.

... continuing to hold the Gospel's truth makes much more serious and dangerous demands than mere lip-service paid to undigested information. Unless we make the truth our own through prayer, thought and argument - through prayer and study and an unflinching quest for understanding - it will be chipped away, reshaped, eroded by the power of an imagining fed by other springs, tuned to quite different stories. And this unceasing, strenuous, vulnerable attempt to make sone Christian sense of things, not just in what we say, but in the ways in which we 'see' the world, is what is known as doing theology. (4)

For a helpful unpacking of some of the themes in this fine piece of theology, see Simon Barrow's paper What Difference does God make today?

Refugee policy - a defining issue for Christians and to live beyond anger

Browsing through some columns that I wrote for Zadok Perspectives back in 2002, I came across a column on refugees. It was written after the events surrounding the Tampa. Though some things have changed since then, some critical things haven't.

I have therefore reproduced it in its original form. What is truly sobering is that it would take very few editorial changes to bring it up to deal with current issues. The pastoral issues as to how we can live faithfully in such a time as this remain as does the anger that I need to deal with.

Prophetic Patience - Active Waiting -  Refugee policy as a defining issue

Despite the inescapable impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, for many Australians the treatment of refugees became the defining issue of public policy in the year just past. The divisions in Australian society revealed by the Coalition Government’s handling of the “Tampa” event, the “Pacific solution” and mandatory detention seem likely to be with us for some time.

The issues raised by the current government policy stance on refugees are complex and ramify out to include questions of church state relations, indigenous reconciliation and the atrophy of public debate on political issues. They will have to wait for another time. What I want to engage with in this column is the reality that I find myself called to live out my discipleship in an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in the wider Australian community toward the stranger and the refugee.

I have been shocked at the depth of my own anger at the events that have unfolded over the past year and the cynical willingness of the government to demonise the stranger in the form of refugees for their own political ends. Overlaying this has been a deep frustration and helplessness that almost no one was speaking for me in the public realm. Their was no debate during the election. The two major parties were trying to out macho each other over border protection and were quick to silence dissident voices amongst their candidates.

While I know that many Christians do not share this interpretation of  what has happened, I am also aware of a significant number who share my state of mind. There is a significant issue of pastoral care and witness at stake here and I can only ask those for whom this is not an issue to stay and listen.

What resources do we have to live as disciples, to live humanly in a time of fear in our community and anger within ourselves? How can we avoid becoming conformed in our reaction to the violence which we are called as Christians to overcome? For many this has been a moment when the automatic and unquestioning identity between being a Christian and being an Australian has been jolted.  We have been made aware of the possibility that there might have to be a gap between the two identities if we are to be faithful to the Gospel.

What Isaiah has to say

Biblical reflection seems an appropriate first step. During the election campaign, in which the appeal to a variety of fears seemed to have become the staple fare of both major political parties, I found myself reading through the prophet Isaiah. The following passages from Isaiah 8 snagged my attention like a woolen jumper on an obtruding nail.

Do not call conspiracy

All that these people call conspiracy;

Do not fear what they fear,

do not be afraid of them.

It is Yahweh Sabaoth,

 you must hold in veneration,

him you must fear,

him you must dread.

….

I bind up this testimony,

I seal this revelation,

In the heart of my disciples.

I wait for Yahweh

Who hides his face from the House of Jacob;

in him I hope

…

Distressed and starving he will wander through the country

and, starving, he will become frenzied,

Blaspheming his king and his God

Turning his gaze upward,

then down to the earth,

He will find only distress and darkness,

the blackness of anguish,

and will see nothing but night.

Is not all blackness where anguish is.

There is a passion in the prophet’s message which makes most of the preaching in our churches sound anaemic. The recovery of such passion and an honesty about our emotions and the violence within us and around us is an important step within the Christian community if we are to overcome violence.

The passage quoted above from Isaiah though it is honest and unsparing in its account of the darkness of the prophet’s time offer us some clues about the virtues and spirituality that we need to embody if we are to be faithful to God’s calling.

Truthfulness

The prophet calls us to truthfulness. We need to find the words to truly describe what is happening, which is to say that we need to learn how to speak truthfully.  … do not call conspiracy all that they call conspiracy… For the prophet to speak truthfully is to draw out clearly the dimensions of the tragedy while opening himself to the reality of the pain of those who are entangled in lies. The virtue of truthfulness will be as much a public and political activity as it is a spiritual discipline. It requires us in this context to research the reality of refugee policy and the experiences of those who have been refugees and not accept without question the official definitions and language.

That will be hard enough. But Isaiah pushes us further. We need to learn how to fear appropriately, that is we need to learn how to fear rightly. In our case we need to learn not to fear the stranger and the refugee but to fear God. The God that we are called to fear is not the god of violence and destruction but the God revealed in Jesus Christ. We are to fear the God who comes to us in the form of the servant and the powerless.

Patience

We will also need to learn how to wait, how to be patient. Isaiah announces that he will wait for the right time for his message and for God’s action. The prophet is committed to a patience and a waiting in which he shares the pain and the darkness of his community.  The prophet speaks not from a position of moral superiority and distance but as someone who allows the darkness to reverberate within his own being.  The kind of patience Isaiah is called to has its analogue in the New Testament embedded in the Lord’s prayer.

Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas in their wonderful account of the Christian life Lord Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life (Abingdon, 1996) highlight the importance of patience.

We have just prayed ‘your kingdom come”, a petition full of hope. Now we are taught to say “your will be done” a petition for patience…. Indeed our hopes as Christians can make us dangerous if they are not schooled by patience. Without patience we are tempted to storm the walls of injustice, destroying our enemy and thus betraying God’s way of forgiveness. Instead we are called to be a patient people schooled as we are by the patience of our crucified God so that the world might know that love not violence rules this world. God’s way of dealing with us and our evil is called the cross, the unlimited suffering patience of God. We are called to take up our cross and follow God’s patience. (p.65)

The patience that is called for here in the Lord’s prayer has nothing to do with passivity. It is an active waiting which is expressed in service. For my wife and myself that active waiting has taken the form of joining a local community refugee support group. The group has no formal church connections but the vast majority of the members are active in a number of local Catholic and Anglican parishes.

While the group works with the immigration authorities in the resettlement of refugees under the humanitarian resettlement program it has also committed itself to providing active support for refugees with Temporary Protection visas: that is to say refugees who have arrived in Australia and whose claim on arrival to refugee status has been accepted by the government, but who receive little assistance from the government to access their entitlements.

Christmas Eve found me as part of a group of over a dozen people helping shift furniture into a flat for an Afghani refugee family on a temporary protection visa, and in the process committing myself in a small way to learning the patience called for in the Lord’s prayer and something of the truth of the refugee’s experience. The first English words learnt by their two year old daughter after 11 months in Port Headland detention camp were ‘Hullo officer.’ That says a lot. As we manoeuvred the furniture up the stairs it occurred to me what a highly appropriate way it was to commence my Christmas celebration.

Reconciliation

In Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing (Resources for Reconciliation) By Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice (IVP, 2008) the authors chart a a comprehensive vision for reconciliation that is biblical in origin, transformative and holistic in practice and global in relevance.

This is the first in a series of books from the Duke Centre for Reconciliation.
http://www.divinity.duke.edu/reconciliation/

The authors who are the co-directors of the centre, come with histories of engagement in contexts, Uganda and Mississippi where the issue of reconciliation has been pressing.

They draw on the resources of the Christian story, including their own individual experiences in Uganda and Mississippi, to bring solid, theological reflection to bear on the work of reconciling individuals, groups and societies. They articulate in an accessible language some distinctively Christian practices that will help the church be both a sign and an agent of God's reconciling love in the fragmented world of the twenty-first century and offer Ten theses towards Recovering Reconciliation as the Mission of God.

This book is a good example of how theology should be done - cooperatively, in specific real life contexts where the issues of brokenness are pressing at an individual and community level and in service of the church as a community, exploring what God's project for the renewal of human life looks like in these contexts.

Reading bonhoeffer - God is no stopgap

Reading Bonhoeffer I have to remind myself again and again that much of his writing was in the context of a totalitarian regime and that in his writing he is attempting a profound critique of the regime and the way the church was responding without spelling out that specific context, an that for perfectly obvious reasons when you stop and think about it.

Much of his reflections about responsibility, for example, were about the ethical underpinning to his approach to the plot against Hitler. If we forget that we will read his writings as a purely academic discourse separate from the context in which he found himself. To do that is to fundamentally misread him and to miss the full stretch and challenge that he was making to theological and intellectual heritage hat he was brought up in.

And in the end he keeps gong with his refrain of the inextricable worldliness of Christianity.

God is no stopgap. God must be known not at the boundaries of our possibilities but in the midst of life, in life and not just in dying, in health and strength and not just in suffering. God wants to be known in action and not just in sin. The reason for this lies in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. He is in the midst of life. Seen from the midst of life certain questions disappear and so do the answers to such questions. (p.253 I want to Spend These Days with You.