Letter to a friend concerning Occupy Wall Street

Hey RR,

I always look forward to what you blog which always made me pause and think about what you have to say. Your latest piece on the Occupy Wall Street was no exception. Indeed, I read it some time back which really took some time for me to think about what you said. Anyway, I thought I write a letter to you to give you some of my thoughts about this phenomenon.

The Church should be above politics?

Should it? Or, should we find out what do we mean by ‘above’ politics? In the sense the Church is floating and so passing by all matters political, untouched and untainted by them?

The Church concerns only with God and what God has done, is doing, and will do with his people. In this sense, there are indeed areas that the Church bypasses without needing to give any regard, for eg. the vague scenario whether should you eat cabbage or broccoli at the hawker’s center tomorrow. Hence the question is not whether should the Church float above politics, but is politics included in what God has done, is doing, and will do with his people?

As citizens of a nation-state and people who confesses allegiance to God and his Christ, the Church is inevitably overlapped by anything non-Church that are located within the shared national border and policy. This overlap means that the politics of the non-Church may occasionally spill over into the Church, and vice versa. So, if politics affects the Church, then the Church cannot help but to engage it. In other words, the Church should not float above politics.

One may object by saying that anything political is dirty and therefore the Church should not have anything to do with it. But isn’t the Church itself dirty, filled with weed? (Matthew 13:24-30) So should we then ask the stupid question, should then the Church floats above itself? Or should we pretend that the Church consists of utopian human beings who have no problem giving up their parking lot to other Church members during Sunday service?

If politics is part and parcel of the Church, and if national politics and the Church mutually affects each other, then in order to do Church, we have to do politics. And here lies a fundamental question to ask: What does it mean for the Church to do politics?

From that one question springs other questions: Does doing politics mean having the parliament filled with Church people? Does it mean legislating laws based on obligations that are meant only for the people of God? Does it mean ‘Christendom’? If it is, then what is ‘Christendom’?

There are of course many other questions that we can ask. However, the point of this post is simply to point out that the Church does not and should not be above politics. In any case, the Church is called to be precisely what it is not: the light and salt in a world that overbears upon the people of God.

A recent example of how this plays out is Rowan Williams’ meeting with Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe.

“The Archbishop of Canterbury is using his moral authority to persuade Mugabe to desist and repent. He denounces the injustices and demands change. It may not work, of course, but merely by visiting the land and speaking out, he manifests humanitarian conviction and moral fibre. He shames our politicians and eclipses other church leaders as he confronts face-to-face that which is largely ignored by the African Union, the British Government, the US, the EU and the UN.” (Cranmer)

Questions: To modestly go where some might have gone before!

It’s almost 4pm, I’m sitting here finishing my cup of green tea, and wrapping my mind around Chris’s challenge: “Jesus is the answer!: But what is the question?”.In Malaysia, we are used to slogans, and catchy phrases flood our TV screens as well as our digital screens. Since a lot of our Christian expressions are imported from places who have a knack for coining phrases, it’s not surprising we jump on the bandwagon.

While I’m not going to start a debate on whether Jesus is THE answer or not, we’ll leave that for another day.  I plan to take a step back and ask with Chris, “What is the question?” or better “What are the questions?”. Chris starts the ball rolling directed to the Church at large:

“what is her relationship to society at large? To be more specific: (1) What is her stand on the marginalized in society? (2) What is the Church stand on power?”

Nothing too disrespectful right? It’s not questioning the authority of the church (yet). It’s asking so we can think through this together.  So we can enter a dialogue  on these important issues facing us in Malaysia for a start. We need to talk about issues concerning the society, i.e., the world we live in.  We need to ask what does it mean to be ‘marginalized’; who is ‘marginalized’, what is ‘power’; who is ‘powerful’ and who is ‘powerless’?

Jesus is the answer!: But what is the question?

By now the catchphrase “Jesus is the answer!” has become a standard trope among Christians and churches. Looking back now (after being a Christian for slightly more than two decades), I notice that as a young Christian, I accepted this phrase so wholeheartedly that there has been occasion where I bandied to people around me as if it is an article of faith. Nonetheless, as I grow older, I began to have doubt about such a slogan. If Jesus is the answer then what is the question?

Reading Athanasius’ Christology with Larry Hurtado’s findings

There is a popular rumor about the Church Fathers, such as Athanasius, having imported foreign categories into theology proper. It charges that Christianity’s understanding of Jesus Christ since the fourth century is deeply infiltrated by paganistic Greek philosophy. The famous case is none other than the word homoousios (Greek: ‘of the same substance’), which is seen as a dubious theological imposition on the earliest Christians’ historical experience of God and Jesus, to which has since distorted the (trinitarian) idea of divinity in the consciousness of the Church. To inquire into this matter, we may look back into the uncompromising dispute between Arius and Athanasius.

The Alexandrian presbyter Arius and his followers (Arians) challenged one of the most sacred conviction among the Christians in the fourth century. They proposed that Christ is not God but simply a pristine being created by God. Hence the Son does not exist eternally. The main person who was more than able to engage the Arians was Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria at that time. He insisted that the Son exists eternally along God and shares the same divine nature. Although Athanasius is not the one who introduces the term homoousios to the world, he is the best known defender of it in that century. Hence if homoousios is an invalid theological construct, we would have Athanasius to blame. But we have to ask whether is this the case?

Those of the view that the Bishop is responsible to corrupting Christianity’s theology proper often do not realize what was at stake in the Arian controversy. Alasdair Heron has helpfully elaborated that the main contention in the dispute is due to the different paradigm held by Arius and Athanasius. To quote Heron extensively,

The origins of the Arian conception of God lay in the tradition of philosophical theology which had begun with Xenophanes. This took as axiomatic an absolute distinction between God and the world, which was closely bound up with equally radical disjunctions between the mind and the body, and between the intelligible and the sensible realms. Thus the being of God, while in one sense seen as totally separate from non-divine being, is yet implicitly conceived of as being epistemologically accessible to the mind whose vision is clarified and refined. Through self-knowledge lies the path to knowledge of God, and the being of God may be grasped and spoken in terms drawn from the mind’s self-analysis, and then further qualified to take account of the difference even between the mind and God. [...] Athanasius does not entirely reject this sort of approach: it has a part to play in his theology, as in most Christian theology before and since. What he does insist on, however, is that this avenue to knowledge of God must be controlled by the fact that God himself has made himself known in Christ, and that it is with Christ as God that genuine knowledge of God must begin. Arius on the other hand never reaches the point where he can admit that Christ is God: his thought is wholly shaped by these other influences, and his epistemological starting-point is thus at the opposite pole from Athanasius.
(Alasdair I. C. Heron, ‘Homoousios with the Father,’ in The Incarnation: Ecumenical Studies in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed A. D. 381, ed. Thomas F. Torrance [UK: Handsel Press, 1981], pp.70-71. H/T: Leow Theng Huat.)

The Arians’ paradigm is traced back to Xenophanes, while Athanasius’ back to “the fact that God himself has made himself known in Christ“. To understand Athanasius’s point further, we may juxtapose it with the historical study done by Larry Hurtado,

To judge by NT writings, Jesus was not reverenced at the expense of God, but instead as the unique agent and expression of God (e.g., as God’s “Image,” “Son”), and in obedience to the one God, who has designated Jesus as the “Kyrios” to whom this robust cultic reverence is to be given.

In the historical context, it is a novel development: professing the “one God” of Israel and yet also including as rightful (even required) recipient of devotion a distinguishable, second figure. The NT evidences, not dreams of some future time when a messianic figure may be reverenced (as, e.g., in the “Similtudes” of 1 Enoch), but instead a real and dramatic re-formulation of regular devotional practice in historically identifiable circles of early Christians. Given the special significance attached to worship practice, the programmatic inclusion of Jesus as co-recipient/recipient of their devotion is remarkable.

Of course, these first Christians insisted that they remained true to the “monotheistic” stance inherited from the ancient Jewish tradition. But, judging by the actual way that they practiced their worship and larger devotional life, theirs was a distinguishable form of “monotheistic” practice involving the programmatic inclusion of Jesus along with God.
(Emphasis added)

With this juxtaposition, we see that the theological term homoousios is not a distortion, but rather the approximated term that is considered to be the most appropriate constructed description of the earliest Christians’ knowledge of God and Jesus.

It seems clear that Athanasius is well aware that homoousios is not a foreign imposition forced into the theology proper of the Church. In contrast to the Arians, who were too ready to perceive God and Jesus through Xenophanes’ philosophy, Athanasius understood well the ‘novelty’ of the earliest Christians’ encounter with God and Jesus. The employment of homoousious is therefore used as a restrictive category that prevents the perception of God from being corrupted by foreign ideology. And precisely because of its preventive function, the category is liberated to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son based on the historical experiences of the earliest believers. To Athanasius, the theological notion that Jesus shares the same divine nature as God is because he is known as such historically.