Haiti and appalling theology

Pat Robertson the American fundamentalist preacher is not the person claiming to speak on behalf of the christian faith who has been uttering utterances that can only be characterised as displaying an appalling theology.

In his blog on the Ekklesia website Symon Hill reports on his encounter with Jonathan Campbell a Northern Irish minister on a program on BBC Radio Ulster.

We discussed this issue after hearing moving testimony about the unimaginable horror with which the country is faced, the numbers killed and starving and the groups of Haitians who have gathered to sing hymns in the midst of this devastation. Campbell expressed his sympathy with the Haitian people and encouraged financial donations to evangelical relief agencies, but insisted it was the practise of Voodoo – a “destructive religion” – that has caused the tragedy.

...

This alarming interpretation ignores the far more tangible and visible consequences of human sin. While an earthquake on this scale would have caused devastation anywhere, the extreme poverty in Haiti means that poor building conditions and the lack of infrastructure made the tragedy far, far worse. In a world in which the means to end poverty are available, the economic structures that prevent this happening are surely sinful. While Jonathan Campbell quoted the Book of Revelation at me (somewhat selectively), he overlooked the reality that the oppression of the poor and vulnerable is the sin that the Bible condemns more than any other.

A small number of churches in the UK may hear references to Voodoo in sermons or prayers about Haiti this morning. However, I’m also worried about comments that may be heard, far more numerously, in more mainstream churches. Faced with tragedy on this scale, some preachers and priests feel a desire to explain it. Such a desire is understandable, but misguided. It easily leads to simplistic responses, such as those that suggest that the earthquake is part of God’s plan. It is not. To say such a thing is to ask us to worship a God who not only hurts people, but targets the poorest and most vulnerable in the infliction of suffering.

We need to get away from the notion of God “up there”, meting out punishment and reward on a whim. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God who suffers with us “down here”. From this perspective, the problem of suffering is not an academic question about God’s nature, but a practical one about how we allow the love of God to transform us so that we live differently and tackle injustice.

A God who inflicts suffering – for any reason – is an ogre. The God who in Jesus Christ was nailed to a cross as a political criminal is a God who suffers with us and allows us to glimpse the possibility of a better world.

Haiti- like a war zone

Report on Ekklesia web site from the ACT Alliance of Global Churches states that:

Haiti's capital looks like a war zone and one million people are without shelter following the devastating earthquake that shook the Caribbean nation, the ACT Alliance global network of churches and related agencies has warned.The 7.0 magnitude quake that struck on 12 January 2010, brought down or made uninhabitable between 60 and 80 per cent of the houses in the capital of Port-au-Prince, the Geneva-based alliance said in a statement on its website.

"In a city that ACT Alliance members say looks like a war zone, hundreds of thousands are roaming the streets looking desperately for relatives and other loved ones," the grouping reported.
"Thousands of people in Port-au-Prince - injured, hungry and desperate - have spent days outdoor[s] in the demolished capital of Haiti without food or shelter," the alliance said in a separate 15 January report. "Desperate Haitians have blocked streets with corpses in anger. Food is stocking up at the airport, but has not yet been distributed."

The network had earlier said some of its members around the world were continuing to wait for news of colleagues missing following the quake, which has been described as the worst to hit the Caribbean nation in 200 years. Tens of thousands of Haitians are feared dead. ACT Alliance described rescue and humanitarian operations as being complicated because the United Nations is "paralysed" following the collapse of its main building, which left more than 100 UN staff missing.

Christians as atheists - resisting empire

 In some of the early conflicts between the Christians and the Roman Empire, the Christians were described as atheists because they reused to acknowledge, offer incense to the emperor. This was not a matter of religion as a category of intellectual belief in one god, the Christian one as a matter of individual or personal choice, rather than another god, the roman one.

There was no distinction between religion and politics. The early Christians saw themselves committed to membership in a polis, in which Jesus was Lord, a lordship manifested as the suffering servant, not the Emperor, whose lordship was maintained through the use of coercion and violence.  This stance relativised the absolute claims of the Roman Empire. Hence the term atheist that was applied to those who refused to conform to the claims that violence and power were the ultimate source of authority.

Such an atheism with respect to the claims of the empire committed Christians to the way of peace - the Beatitudes formed a key part of the catechism for those wishing to become disciples in the first couple of centuries. There is I think room for such atheism to become the norm once again in the church. To resist again the claims of the state to ultimate control over our bodies as participants in war is a form of atheism which is strongly supported by the Gospels.

The State has taken on the aura of religious authority, it is upheld by a form of civil religion of which the clearest public outcroppoing can be seen on Anzac Day. The state claims final authority over our bodies and our resources to sustain its war making apparatus. We need more atheists, like the early Christians who will resist these religio/political claims that sustain the cycle of violence.

Atheism, Christianity and Marxism and what are the issues at stake?

Stumbled today across some reviews of the book by the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton Reason, Faith and Revolution in some locations that do not normally give theology much of a run. For example in Salon Andrew O'Hehrir begins his review thusly:

Here is how British literary critic Terry Eagleton begins his brisk, funny and challenging new book: "Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs. For the most part, it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive ideology." That's quite a start, especially when you consider that the point of Eagleton's "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate" -- adapted from a series of lectures he delivered at Yale in April 2008 -- is to defend the theory and practice of religion against its most ardent contemporary critics. ...


It's only a slight simplification to say that in this compact little tome, which runs less than 200 pages and is largely conversational in tone, Eagleton hopes to save Christianity from the Christians and Marxism from the Marxists. Yet the book's easy-breezy, wisecracking character is deceptive; I had to read it through twice before concluding that it's one of the most fascinating, most original and prickliest works of philosophy to emerge from the post-9/11 era. http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/04/28/terry_eagleton/

Stanley Fish weighs in a similar vein in a blog in the New York Times:
 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/god-talk/

Reviews in the Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/reason-faith-and-revolution-by-terry-eagletonbr-the-case-for-god-by-karen-armstrong-1749432.html
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/04/john-micklethwait-adrian-wooldridge-reviewand The Times http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article6293043.ece.are a little less free swinging in their coverage but capture the sense of a full blown intellectual barney in which an exploration of serous issues has apparently not prevented Eagleton from engaging in some entertaining and in places coruscating prose.

Eagleton has had Dawkins in his sights for a while his review of the God Delusion  http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
gives some idea of what has apparently now surfaced in his attack on the composite figure of Ditchkins (Dawkins and Hitchens).

Looks like there are some serious theological and political issues laid on the table by Eagleton in a way that suggests that atheism of a certain character and politically engaged Christian orthodoxy that takes the call of Jesus seriously might not be that far apart. After all Christians in the Roman empire were regarded as atheists.

Andrew O'Hehir points us in that direction when he observes alate in his review:

You can almost hear the steel chairs creaking as the last secular liberals rise to depart when Eagleton declares where his true disagreement with Richard Dawkins lies, which does not directly concern the existence of God or the role of science. "The difference between Ditchkins and radicals like myself," he writes, "hinges on whether it is true that the ultimate signifier of the human condition is the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal, and what the implications of this are for living."

Update
Some more reviews:
 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/09/17/religion-for-radicals-an-interview-with-terry-eagleton/ 
 http://thefriend.org/article/two-views-on-faith/  
 http://communities.canada.com/ottawacitizen/blogs/ideas/archive/2009/07/24/marxist-critic-critiques-new-atheist-cant.aspx

  

The human face of Israel's Occupation

Christian Peacemakers Team bulletin - just one human face, one story of the reality of Israeli occupation.

For information on Christian Peacemaker Teams see: http://www.cpt.org/

The Palestinian shepherd arrested last week after soldiers attacked his family and CPTers (see http://tiny.cc/cpt1) was tortured before being released by police.

The same eight soldiers who arrested Raba’i and attacked his family took him to a military base at the nearby Suseya settlement. For four hours, soldiers struck him in the back, in the face, and slammed him into walls. The soldiers questioned him about his brothers. Raba’i refused to give any information and refused to speak Hebrew with the soldiers, which infuriated them. The soldiers told him that they would come to his house in the following days and beat or kill him and his brothers. They tried to force him to say that they were the best soldiers in the IDF and beat him when he would not. Raba’i told CPTers the soldiers tied his hands and feet, blindfolded him, and sat him on a chair. Raba’i put his head in his lap, in an attempt to protect his head and his genitals, and refused to lift it. He said that at one point, a soldier cocked his rifle and told him to lift his head or he would shoot him. Raba’i refused. When another soldier tried to bring him food and water, as the military is legally obligated to do in such situations, the soldiers who were torturing him swore at the soldier and told him to leave. The soldiers also refused to allow Raba’i to pray.

After four hours of this interrogation and torture, they took Raba’i to Israeli police station in Kiryat Arba settlement. The Israeli police told him that they usually offer detainees food and water, but were giving him nothing because they wanted to punish him. They said that if they ever saw his face again, they would kill him. After thirty minutes, the police tied his hands and feet, blindfolded him, drove him to a location unknown to him and threw him out of the jeep. Fearing that soldiers, police or settlers might see him, he hid in a bush until he saw his family's car.

Raba'i was able to call his family, who, accompanied by CPTers, found him and brought him home.

For photos of Raba'i’s injuries see here: Injuries-caused-by-soldiers.

Please share this story with your community and consider other ways of supporting CPT's work in Palestine: http://www.cpt.org/participate

Climate change and apocalyptic political imagination

Mark Bahnisch has an important article over at Larvateus Prodeo "The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary".

Mark has an interesting discussion on apocalyptic politics drawing on the recent book First As Tragedy, Then As Farce by Slavoj Žižek. For details on the book see First as Tragedy then as Farce

Mark starts his piece by observing that:

One of the accusations frequently made by climate change deniers or ’skeptics’ against those who would like to see concerted action taken to ameliorate the impacts of anthropogenic global warming is that of being somehow apocalyptic. A related charge is that climate change activism is somehow a screen or cover for an unstated political agenda.

Futile as the attempt to deny and disavow the fact that a process of climate change is  koccurring, and that human actors are causal agents, it’s nevertheless the case that this discourse is not without its effects in the world. So it’s worth analysing this phenomenon.

There is no doubt that apocalyptic politics are in style.

He then provides an interesting introduction the discussion of apocalyptism in  Žižek's book and the task of developing a new vision of for human society.

The irony is that climate change deniers are using the rhetorical move of asserting that climate change is simply and only a cover for a hidden political agenda when the challenge is that the task of imagining a new sustainable political world order, a politics beyond business as normal, that is called for by the reality of climate change has barely begun.

The theology and practice of the tradition of radical Christianity has something to bring to the work that has to begin.

Bringing Epiphany down to earth

The sermon this morning on the feast of the Epiphany started out with some promise. We were offered an account of the wise men in their social and historical context. The sermon then moved to an account of the world at the time of the incarnation as looking for God and the wise men as a model for that seeking.

No account of the reality that this was a time of Empire and any search for God had political implications - there was no distinction between "religion" and 'politics" as we know it today. Wise men from the east looking for a king in one of the more troublesome provinces on the edge of the Roman empire could only spell trouble, a suggestion of political manouvering and a hint of possible alliances to challenge Roman hegemony. Whatever the wise men thought they were doing Herod was not going to let anyone pull a fast one that might place his relationship with the Empire and its economic benefits in jeopardy.

There was no hint in the sermon that discipleship might be challenging, dangerous or place us in tension with the ruling powers. Kyle Childress in his commentary on the Ekklesia Project blog site for Luke 2:1-20 gets to one of the issues that bugged me about this morning's sermon:

One of the great dangers and persistent temptations of the Christian life is abstraction and reduction, universalization and generalization. We like platitudes and principles, spiritual laws and high-sounding words like “love” and “grace” or “justice.”

But not with Luke. Not with the New Testament. At Christmas we run up against the Incarnation. Instead of timeless truth we get God in particular: a teenaged mother and young father with their baby in a cattle trough, trying to stay warm in a cow shed on the backside of a dusty overlooked town on the far side of the Roman Empire. We get the specific, the particular, the concrete. None of this “once upon a time,” timeless and eternal we get in fairy stories. This story can be dated – when Quirinius was governor of Syria. We can take a road map and follow Mary and Joseph’s journey from Galilee to Nazareth to Bethlehem. ... We get an angel calling Mary. God speaking to Joseph. God coming in the particularity of a baby.

The particularity of the Gospel in the Incarnation then and in our attempts at discipleship now continually gets lost in a fog of spirituality that does not address the reality of the world in which I find myself living. An account of the wise men which ignores the politically motivated genocide that follows their visit and the account of Jesus, Mary and Joseph as refugees leaves us comfortably where we are in a consumer oriented society which is not worried about "religion" as a consumer choice that has no connection with the public realm.

Update: for a reading of Epiphany that sets it in the context of Empire, while reminding us of the current slaughtering of the innocents see Gene Stolzfus Massacring the Innocents.