This is something I wrote on Calvin-in-Common about an alternative approach toward the conflict regarding the Calvin BOT Memo prohibiting advocacy by Calvin faculty regarding homosexuality.
I think often the “pastoral” and the “prophetic” are set against each other as if what is required is balance. I disagree. The irony of the union between the pastoral and the prophetic is found in Isaiah’s call in Isaiah 6 which is embraced by Jesus and given to his disciples in Matthew 13.
The point I was hoping to communicate is not just that Jesus brings release to the captives (see his Luke 4:18-19 manifesto from Isaiah) but Jesus upends the way of revolution. The history of the world is one of perpetual revolution where slaves become tyrants but the manner of revolution remains the same. When Jesus was crucified everyone got the message Rome was sending. “This is the way we save the world and this is what we do to those who defy us.”
Jesus not only challenges empire’s brand of saving world order but also undermines empire’s manner of bringing world order. At the heart of the Christian narrative is the irony that the Jesus’ blood on a Roman cross was the means by which Rome’s (and every other power that backs empire or perpetuates it, see the book of Revelation) mission and methods are undone.
Our hearts immediately jump to the practical question of “how can we get our way in this conflict”. We are motivated by our clear view of the injustice and wrongness of the other side. As a Calvinist I don’t doubt the wrongness of the other side, I’m more suspect of the ease of assumption of rightness on my own part.
One of the real insights that Christianity brings via Jesus’ comment in Luke and Stephen’s comment in Acts in their executions “forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” as well as the perspectives of Ephesians 6 and the book of Revelation that we are not only the perpetrators of evil but also proxies for greater and larger evil behind us. This was what I was referring to with MLK Jr. in how he differed from the Black Panthers and other groups of the time. The enemy was not people, it was the mindset that held the people and brought them do what they were doing. In our Reformed tradition we aren’t simply plagued by “sins” as bad things that we do, the situation is worse. We are captives of SIN, a blindness, a trap, a system that grips us and motivate us to participate in and perpetuate the evil we see.
The reason empire acts the way it does in terms of its means of revolution is because those are the only tools it has. It works to impact behavior through systems of power and control. “The sword” is a tool that is sufficient to elicit compliance to the will of another. We work through power, money, and threats to elicit alternative behavior to the actions we describe as evil. This is effective in attempting to curb “sins”, but far less effective in treating SIN. The sword is powerless to actually free people from SIN and therefore what the sword settles for is to remove people from positions of influence and power and to marginalize people so that their opinions and perspectives won’t have power in the community. Ultimately when people prove to be unmanageable by the power of the sword the sword pursues its final destination which is to imprison and kill.
As people who know little of anything BUT the sword in order to do business we ask “Well then what can we do to stop evil?” That of course is what Jesus came to do for us and to train us in. The sword is unable to change the heart, it can only change behavior. Self-donating love and prayer are the means by which hearts are freed.
The complaint is always the same. “Prayer and self-sacrifice don’t get us anywhere.” There is something to that. People’s complaints against turning the other cheek is that you get both cheeks slapped and Jesus does nothing to disavow this observation. Look what prayer and self-sacrifice along with articulated moral clarity regarding the power structures of his own context got him, a Roman cross. Jesus is dealing with exactly the same world we deal with. But the Christian message is also that this cross gives birth to an empty tomb which is itself the birth of a new age, a new world, creation 2.0.
