Principalities and Powers (2)

(Part 2 of 2)

In last week’s essay, I made some sharp criticisms of the Presiding Bishop’s Easter Letter – its tendency to eisegesis (reading his own views into Scripture, rather than reading out of Scripture the ideas it sets forth), its privileging of the experience of those deemed to be marginalized and oppressed as a source of truth, and the simplistic moral calculus enabled by these approaches.  It is a sample of the kind of “bubble” thinking that is endemic in our time, and not just among progressives. (If I appear to be singling out progressives, it is because they have long been dominant in the Episcopal Church.) It used to be reactionary conservatives whose mantra was “No new ideas shall ever come near to us”, but progressives also can insulate themselves from new movements of thought. If they want to convince others they have to engage with other views.  The time is overdue for opening windows, and letting some fresh breezes in.

At their best, progressives make the case for social responsibility towards those who are less advantaged and less powerful. It is an important case to make, for one Scriptural index of a society’s moral health is how it treats those among it without advantages and without power. So listening sympathetically to the voices of those Rowe calls the “silenced, persecuted, and marginalized” is a good practice –  provided that our criteria for identifying such persons is not simplistic dichotomizing. But when privileges and penalties are assigned arbitrarily to favored and disfavored groups,  it only undermines and discredits the very concept of social responsibility as just another political power game.  That is the trap into which progressives tend to fall, and it weakens their moral witness. 

That’s bad for the cause of Christian social responsibility; but it is worse still for theology, the faith of the Church.  When we reduce the gospel to a social activist agenda – treating them as virtual synonyms – we empty of its proper theological substance. The gospel simply becomes a metaphor for earthly politics.  Of course, it is not just progressives who can hijack the gospel for a social or political agenda.  I read a blog recently that noted (in a different context, the use of the Bible by self-improvement gurus) “the unsettling ease with which biblical revelation is reduced to a symbolical apparatus for personal growth, civic reform, or the moral improvement of man”. Conservatives can play that game too – but they have no voice in the leadership of the Episcopal Church.  It’s the progressive voices in the church that need calling to account. 

Reductionist accounts of the gospel have their own attractiveness to us, their own potent temptations.  They give us an opportunity for self-justification.  By siding politically with a group we identify as “the oppressed” over against their “oppressors”, we burnish our self-image and win approval.  Though we would never use the word, we are indeed seeking approval as “righteous” – which is to say, we are engaged in the project of establishing our own righteousness by our own works, the project of the Scribes and Pharisees. Such self-righteous moralism prevents us from seeing ourselves as in need of redemption. (“We are the good guys”.)   It prevents us from seeing that all stand in need of redemption – the oppressor and the oppressed alike. As Exodus, Numbers, and Judges teach us, the oppressed are not saved by the fact of their being oppressed – they too need a savior from their moral flaws and spiritual blindness.   

That’s why the Easter morning that began with the women’s discovery of the empty tomb ends that evening with Christ’s opening the minds of all his disciples, “that they might understand the scriptures”, and the purpose of God declared in them, to the effect that “it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day” and also, “that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations” (Luke 24:45-47) – “that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins” (Acts 10:43).  The whole world needs the gospel – male and female, slave and free, oppressor and oppressed alike. Christ’s paschal victory over principalities and powers, of which the women at the tomb are the first witnesses, is a triumph that calls all nations to repentance, and all social, political, and economic structures to account before God. It transforms from the inside out all earthly social distinctions of power and wealth, of race, sex, and class, in ways that do not neatly align with contemporary political and social agendas either progressive or reactionary.  That is the witness delivered to us from that first Easter morning, and which we have received, and wherein we stand, if we have in fact received it.  When we convert that witness to a metaphor for any otherworldly agenda, we throw his victory away.