“Righteous indignation” may be real, and in some cases legitimate, but the line between its legitimate form and “self-righteous-indignation” is blurry. Dallas Willard gives a good vision for dealing with this dangerous balance.

Although he (Jesus) certainly let his condemnation fall upon self-righteous and deeply corrupted leaders, we never see it in other contexts. And we can trust him to express it appropriately toward such people, though we ourselves could rarely if ever do so. Anger and condemnation, like vengeance, are safely left to God. We must beware of believing that it is okay for us to codnemn as long as we are condemning the right things. It is not so simple as all that. I can trust Jesus to go into the temple and drive out those who were profiting from religion, beating them with a rope. I cannot trust myself to do so. – The Divine Conspiracy, 221

When discussing hermeneutical issues like this it leads one to asks other questions that are more risky such as: How do we know the Bible is trustworthy? What do we do with the parts of the Bible that appear implausible? Am I supposed to read Gen 1-11 literally? What about Job? What about the story of Jonah? and so forth.

Here are a couple of books that respond to these issues. The first recommendation deals with the idea of the “redemptive-movement heremeneutic” and the second focuses on some of the questions I mentioned above.

William Webb, Slaves Women and Homosexuals

Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

Also, you can check out Peter Enn’s website where he is in dialogue with some who have read his work: Peterennsonline.com

“You can take it as a general rule that when you don’t transform your pain you will always transmit it. Zealots and contemporary liberals often have the right conclusion, but their tactics and motives are often filled with self, power, control and the same righteousness that they hate in conservatives. Basically, they want to do something to avoid holding the pain until it transforms them. Because of this too common pattern, I have come to mistrust almost all righteous indignation and moral outrage. In my experience, it is hardly ever from God.

‘Resurrected’ people prayerfully bear witness against injustice and evil—but also agree compassionately to hold thier own complicity in that same evil. It is not over there, it is here. It is our problem, not theirs.The Risen Christ, not accidentally, still carries the wounds in his hands and side.” – from Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety, pg. 23.

I’m not sure that she’s right but it’s worth exploring. How we view the atonement (the work of Christ’s death) impacts what we think the Kingdom is and our view of the Kingdom of God necessarily effects our opinions on matters like torture.

You can find her article here:  Mainline America’s Moral Conscience

“Gospels of Sin Management” presume a Christ with no serious work other than redeeming humankind. On the right, they foster “vampire Christians,” who only want a little blood for their sins but nothing more to do with Jesus until heaven, when they have to associate with him. On the left, they foster the Phariseeism of a more or less brutal social self-righteousness.

http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=156 

… The word “religion” comes to us from the Latin religare, to bind.  This etymology reminds me of the line from 2 Peter 2:19b “for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.”  Christians are tied to Christianity (whatever that means), just as athiests are tied (or bound) to athiesm.  In this sense, no one is free.  We see this religious obligation–one so intimate that we are literally tied to it, unable to escape even if we wanted to–in the nation of Israel, and the lives of Job, David, and many others who struggled with God.  

The word also provides an interesting way of approaching the question of torture, where a different (more literal, but none the less intimate) bond is established between the torturer and the one tortured.  

One of the films (for that is my only real reference point on the subject) that captures this relationship in a memorably chilling way is Pan’s Labyrinth.  There is a scene where Captain Vidal is preparing to torture one of the guerilla fighters:

Capitán Vidal: Damn this cigarette is good! Real tobacco – hard to find. 
Stuttering Rebel: G-g-g-go to hell. 
Capitán Vidal: Damn, Garces. We catch one and he turns out to be a stutterer. We’ll be here all night. 
Garcés: As long as he talks. 
Capitán Vidal: Garces is right. You’d do better to tell us everything. But to make sure it happens, I brought along a few tools. Just things you pick up along the way. At first I won’t be able to trust you, but after I use this, you’ll own up to a few things. When we get to these we’ll have developed a… how can I put this? A closer bond, much like brothers. You’ll see. And when we get to this one, I’ll believe anything you tell me.

The movie supposedly closes with a line remarkable similar to Socrates’ assertion that it is “worse for a man to inflict wrong than to suffer it” (Gorgias).  I couldn’t find the line (it wasn’t in the script that I found, but maybe it was added as a kind of closing graphic?), but isn’t this the kind of thing Christians should be quoting?  Or is it dangerous to interpret Jesus’ life (which certainly parallels the Socrates quote nicely) as a kind of national policy?

by Billy Collins

It was a pleasure to enter by a side street

in the center of the city

a bathhouse said to be 300 years old,

old enough to have opened the pores of Florence Nightingale

and soaped the musical head of Franz Liszt.

And it was a pleasure to drink

cold wine by a low wood fire

before being directed to a small room in an upper gallery,

a room with a carpet and narrow bed

where I folded my clothes into a pile

then came back down, naked

except for a gauzy striped cloth tucked around my waist.

It was an odd and eye-opening sensation

to be led by a man with close-cropped hair

and spaces between his teeth

into a steamy rotunda

and to lie there alone on the smooth marble

watching the droplets fall through the beams

of natural light in the high dome

and later to hear the song I sang—

“She Thinks I Still Care”—echo up into the ceiling.

I felt like the last of the sultans

when the man returned and began to scrub me—

to lather and douse me, scour and shampoo me,

and splash my drenched body

with fresh warm water scooped from a marble basin.

But it was not until he sudsed me

behind my ears and between my toes

that I felt myself filling with gratitude

the way a cloud fills with rain,

the way a glass pipe slowly fills with smoke.

In silence I thanked the man

who scrubbed the bottoms of my feet.

I thanked the history of the Turkish bath

and the long chain of bathmen standing unshaven,

arms folded, waiting for the next customer

to come through the swinging doors of frosted glass.

I thanked everyone whose job

it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers,

and I gave general thanks that I was lying

facedown in a warm puddle of soap

and not a warm puddle of blood

in some corner of this incomprehensible city.

As one bucket after another

of warm water was poured over my lowered head,

I stopped thinking of who and what to thank

and rode out on a boat of joy,

a blue boat of marble and soap,

rode out to the entrance of the harbor

where I raised a finger of good-bye

then felt the boat begin to rise and fall

as it met the roll of the incoming waves,

bearing my body, my clean, blessed body out to sea.

690

by Emily Dickinson

Victory comes late —
And is held low to freezing lips —
Too rapt with frost
To take it —
How sweet it would have tasted —
Just a Drop —
Was God so economical?
His Table’s spread too high for Us —
Unless We dine on tiptoe —
Crumbs — fit such little mouths —
Cherries — suit Robbins —
The Eagle’s Golden Breakfast strangles — Them —
God keep His Oath to Sparrows —
Who of little Love — know how to starve —

As we talked about on Tuesday, you don’t have to do any of these, but here’s a list of some spiritual disciplines that correspond to the chapters we’re reading.

Sleep – creating margin

Creation awareness/creation walk – observing God’s masterpiece

Count your blessings – focusing on the positive

Praying the 23rd Psalm

Solitude

Slowing Down

Keeping a Sabbath

Practicing the Presence

Media Fast

Secret Service

Hospitality

Lectio Divina

What I’d suggest we do this week is Creation Awareness/Creation Walk. Those that want to practice a discipline, take a couple of days and spend maybe 20 minutes either sitting or taking a stroll and just take note of what’s in the world around you. Keep foremost in your mind that God is an artist and surrounding us is his masterpiece. Look at the world as if it were a painting and you’re an art student, studying the strokes and design of the landscape. “It is a world that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of God and because God is always in it. It is a world in which God is continually at play and over which he constantly rejoices.” See if this is true this week.

“Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future.” 

This is said in reference to the kind of catharsis that summarizes Dostoevsky’s novels, but it also loosely reminds me of the way the Chronicles of Narnia end:

“And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Lewis, in a real and deliberate way, uses his series of Narnia books to lead the reader to the Great Story, which begins just as the (lesser) Narnia stories end.  So Dostoevsky (according to Bakhtin) uses the “unfinalizable” world of his novels to lead us to an understanding of our world that is, similarly, “open and free.”  And both of these passages close with a reference to infinite futurity, where possibilities are always possible.  

Why is any of this relevant to the blog?  I’m not exactly sure, but I wanted to close with the Orthodox Eucharistic Prayer (aka the prayer of thanksgiving), which also deals with the idea of futurity, but presents it in a way somewhat different from Lewis and Bakhtin.  The prayer is copied at the bottom of this post, but the following phrase has always made my head swim a little bit: “[Thou] didst not cease to do all things until thou hadst brought us up to heaven, and hadst bestowed upon us thy kingdom, which is to come.” 

There is finality here: God eventually ceases to do all things.  However, it is a finality that has not yet been reached, so the language has to stretch to account for this, referring to our being brought to heaven in the past tense, and the bestowing of the kingdom (again in the past tense: “hadst bestowed”) as yet “to come.”  Interestingly, the infinitive is used here, which carries a slightly different meaning than the simple future tense would have (“kingdom is to come” vs. “kingdom will come”).  Another reference to infinite futurity?  Probably not, but I’ll admit that there is something that I find particularly reassuring about this idea of arriving at the end of something (be it a Dostoevsky novel, a series of children’s books, or my life) and realizing that I’m really just at the beginning.

Prayer of Thanksgiving:

It is meet and right to hymn thee, to bless thee, to praise thee, to give thanks unto thee, and to worship thee in every place of thy dominion, for thou art God inexpressible, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever-existing, eternally the same, thou and thine only-begotten Son and thy Holy Spirit. Thou didst bring us from non-existence into being, and when we had fallen away, didst raise us up again, and didst not cease to do all things until thou hadst brought us up to heaven, and hadst bestowed upon us thy kingdom, which is to come. For all these things we give thanks unto thee, and to thine only-begotten Son, and to thy Holy Spirit, for all things of which we know and of which we know not, for the benefits both revealed and unrevealed, which have been done for us. And we give thanks unto thee for this service which thou hast vouchsafed to accept from our hands, even though there stand beside thee thousands of Archangels and ten thousands of Angels, Cherubim and Seraphim, six-winged, many-eyed, borne aloft on their wings.

That is to say, “Sin is necessary, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing(s) shall be well.”  Or even, as E.I. Watkin glosses it, “Sin has its part in the Diving economy of good, but all shall be well…”

This idea is echoed in the song of one of our more recent (natural) mystics: “Don’t worry about a thing.  Cause every little thing gonna be alright.”

Which is to say, “For I know whate’re befall me, Jesus doeth all things well.”

Christ is redeeming all things.  Even blogs.  When you write here, remember this.