"Getting" Jesus

Hat tip to Graham. And Christians wonder why non-Christians don't want any of our "Good News". It often seems that non-Christians "get" Jesus better than we do.

Some tid-bits from the video:

If you're a Christian who supports killing your enemies and torture, you have to come up with a new name for yourself.

...Christians have been lawyering the bible to try to figure out how "love thy neighbor" can mean "hate thy neighbor" and how "turn the other cheek" can mean "s***w you, I'm buying space lasers". Martin Luther King gets to call himself a Christian because he actually practiced loving his enemies.

...Jesus lays on that hippy stuff pretty thick. He has lines like "Do not repay evil with evil" and "Do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you." Really. It's in that book you hold up when you scream at gay people. And not to put too fine a point on it, but "non-violence" was kinda Jesus' trademark. Kinda his big thing. To not follow that part of it is like joining Greenpeace and hating whales.

Masculine Christianity

My friend Dave recently linked to a post which suggested that the church should have a masculine ethos. The premise is that 1 Corinthians 16:13 says in the original Greek that the church should 'Watch, stand firm in the faith, be men, be strong' so somehow, this means the church should have a masculine ethos.

I don't want to debate the process of translation or of exegesis that arrives at this understanding.

What bothers me is the idea of 'masculine Christianity' that appears to be becoming popular, doubtless due in no small measure to the the rantings of Mark Driscoll and his disciples who come up with amazingly anti-Gospel sound-bites like:

We are deadly serious about the great commission and loading all guns to storm hell with the gospel of grace. And we need more men.

Driscoll and his ilk are going to be macho for the Gospel? They are going to do what? Shoot anyone who doesn't love his or her neighbour? Help to usher in the Prince of Peace to his Kingdom through war and hostage-taking?  

Well, count me as one woman who grew up with this sort of doggy-do of a theology and who is not going to be silent in the face of this kind of untruth-dressed-as-truth.

Imagine 'masculine Christians' in the Desert with Jesus: Come'on Jesus! Show the devil your stuff and jump off that Temple. Take control of the world and we'll be your army. And while you're at it, sure, you can go ahead and feed the hungry by turning those rocks into bread.

Or how about in the Garden of Gethsemane Hey Jesus! Why are ya prayin'? Prayin's for girls! Now is the time for action; are you afraid to defend yourself? ****** he's putting the soldier's ear back! Stupid wimp. I guess we knew all along that he didn't have the guts to do what needs doing.

It's not about 'masculine' Christianity or 'feminine' Christianity, it's about Christ-centred Christianity. It's about the church of Christ imitating Christ. Jesus pointed out that he could have called down legions of angels rather than submit himself to the cross. Going to the cross was not an act of passivity nor was it a lack of decisiveness or courage: it was an act of faith. An act of faith in the Resurrection and in the Father's being completely without reference to death. It was an act of faith that death and evil would be defeated not by swinging swords at them, but by entering into them.

The kind of 'masculine Christianity' that is being advocated today is the same self-help idolatry that the ancient Israelites fell into and it's the same that the Roman Empire promoted and it's the same self-help idolatry that our own culture promotes: that our power rests in our own courage and strength and ability to fend for ourselves.

Those who see themselves either as being 'in power' or entitled to being 'in power' will easily fall prey to this idolatry. It's also easy to see why those who either consider themselves to be underdogs, or who have sympathy with underdogs, will grasp the meaning of Christ's gospel that the last will be first and that his strength comes when we are weak. It's obvious why those who want to see themselves as strong and macho don't like the real Gospel, but that doesn't make them right.

Christians and Violence

Our circuit supports a mission project in Western Kenya which was heavily affected by the violence that rocked the country after the Kenyan elections. Among other things, the mission project cares for orphans - both children and young people - by providing them with education in basic literacy skills (children) and education in a trade (young people). It's probably worth saying that a number of children and young people went missing during the violence but, thanks be to God, were all found safe and well.

We have recently received an annual report from the project co-ordinator: a Kenyan woman. In the report, she reflects on the violence engendered by the aftermath of the Kenyan elections and writes:

For Kenyans who marvel at the fact that professed Christians killed their neighbors and destroyed their livelihoods, now is the appropriate time for us to meditate on the place of violence in Christianity and the tendency of many believers to project an understanding of salvation separated from ethics. As Christians we have failed to make a definite stand on violence mainly because classic formulations of central doctrines accommodate and support it by claiming that God saved the world through the violence of the cross. Hence since it can do good, it is not to be tabooed as intrinsically evil.

One of Jesus’ main messages was that we must love our enemies, forgive people who injure us and overcome evil with good. We should forgive one another and foster peaceful coexistence with our neighbors. We need to start a new life all together and we cannot leave out our displaced brothers and sisters in the camps.

Friendly Fire

The headline news item here in the UK today has been a story about friendly fire. US "tankbuster" aircraft fired on a British convoy in Iraq in 2003, killing one British soldier and injuring 4 others.

The US government subsequently refused to release information it had to a British inquest so that the family of the British solider could have information about the circumstances of his death. A video taken from the US aircraft was somehow leaked to British press and the recording was shown on the evening news.

If you read the Tabloid papers or watched the news this morning, there was a definite "them and us" feeling to how this was reported. "We" were the good British good guys and "they" were the American bad guys, and there was an unspoken and never-articulated implication that the American pilot had unconcernedly fired on the British convoy.

Except when the full video was broadcast on the evening news.

The papers and television are widely quoting one of the American pilots saying "We're in jail dude". The bits that are not being widely quoted were the American pilot expressing extreme regret and saying "I'm going to be sick" when it was reported back to him that he'd bombed the British tank unit.

I'm both British and American so I naturally don't want to get into "Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys". I do think it wrong of the US government for having tried to keep the information classified.

What I'm intrigued about, though, is the fact that the British press seems to want to spin this story to make out as if the American pilot didn't care.

I don't think this is institutionalised anti-Americanism in the UK. I think it's the sinful human propensity to want to make other people into enemies and bad-guys. We want nice, simple dualistic categories and don't much like to deal with tragedy. It seems to me that the lives of a number of people were ruined that day and a tragic - and yes, probably avoidable - accident happened. There is no clear "bad guy" here and no evil monster, so the press simply omits the information that puts a tragic human face on the US pilot.

If some of us can have some natural sympathy for an American and we can see how the press has spun the story to portray him as potentially evil, could we entertain the possibility that maybe some of the other people who we simplistically categorise as evil might also possibly be human too?

Christian Peace Bloggers

Michael Westmorland-White at the "Levellers" blog has just started the Christian Peace Bloggers web ring. I've joined but I'm a bit nervous about being able to fulfill his criterion of blogging on peace at least once a week. So why am I nervous and why I have joined?

I've joined and I'm nervous for the same reason. I never set out to study Christianity with a "peace agenda" and I've not really studied any sort of "theology of peace" in depth. My convictions about peace and reconciliation have come out of my study and devotion as a Christian person. To me, peace and reconcilation are at the very heart of the Gospel. Being in a "peace blog ring" seems rather like being in an "Agape-love blog ring".

But maybe the fact that so many other Christians consider peace and reconciliation to be periperial issues or even matters of "worldliness" is part of why being identified as a Christian pacificist and reconciler is a necessary thing.

So I will leave the academic theology of peace to Michael and other ring members who have studied this issue in depth. For me, my basic belief is that selfishness, greed, competition and violence are all out-workings of original sin. I believe that peace and reconciliation (God with humanity and human beings with other human beings) are only possible through Christ and by the grace of the Holy Spirit; I believe that peace is an out-working of holiness. To say that "peace" is a worldly issue or something that God is not concerned about is to say that God does not care about holiness and that God does not care about salvation or reconciliation.

The basis for many of my ideas on peace and Christianity is Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire.