"The Christian World" and Its Shortcomings

Martin Marty is, unquestionably, one of the giants in Christian scholarship and publishing. Consequently, and perhaps unfairly, there is a heightened level of expectation when consuming any of his work and, if that effort should prove lacking, an exaggerated sense of disappointment. Such was the case when I expectantly picked up his The Christian World: A Global History. Published as part of the Modern Library Chronicles, The Christian World is purposefully brief and its treatment deliberately shallow. Instead, the book sets out to give an overview of Christianity from the perspective of it's global presence, purporting to correct a typically euro-centric reading of the majority of Christian history. Instead, Christianity for Marty is a narrative best seen through its various continental episodes by which he organizes the larger work (e.g. "The First Asian Episode," "The Latin American Episode," "The Second African Episode").

Unfortunately, this methodology, which should be the primary draw for the work, manifests in ways more artificial than informative. Marty admits early on that when defining what is "Asian," "African," and "European" that he will be using modern continental distinctions. The problem with this approach is that the modern continents do not reflect the outlook of ancient peoples. In the Mediterranean world in particular, Marty's segregation of the Roman empire into Asian, African, and European contingents proves nothing short of willful anachronism.

The initial chapter beyond Marty's retelling of the Gospel is supposedly about Christianity in Asia, though in fact it focuses almost exclusively on the Levant and Asia minor. That the Levant is technically in Asia according to modern line drawers says nothing of its essential orientation at the time of Christ or the centuries that followed. It faced—ideologically, commercially, and politically—to the West, which is why the end of Paul’s earth, a fact which Marty earlier notes, was Spain and not China. Meanwhile, calling the Byzantine “episode” Asian only creates the impression of global focus. The majority of the “story” narrated is one included in Western-centric retellings and intimately involved, though he is loathe to mention it, interaction between Constantinople and Rome. The same is not true of Constantinople and any truly Asian Christian centers, great or small.

Unfortunately, the same complaint holds for the first African episode, which focuses on North Africa to the exclusion of the rest of the continent (in spite of a thriving Christian community in sub-Saharan Ethiopia). The central "African" figures are Tertullian and Augustine. Never mind that Tertullian spent most of his time indulging in Phrygian heresies and arguing with Rome about them, or that Augustine's most influential teaching revolved around a British heretic. The story, rightly told, is a single Mediterranean episode, and any continental scheme to the contrary reflects, rather blatantly, a modern understanding of what it means to be global.

Marty realizes, if never fully admits, how problematic his scheme is, and he is forced to abandon it on several occasions. For example, having nowhere else to put them, most of the major late antique heresies find their way into a catalog of error in the first African chapter. The fact that Montanism and Manichaeism are Asian heresies, and Pelagianism and Novatianism European ones, does not warrant their removal to their respective chapters. Instead, through scholastic sleight of hand, Marty talks about them as imports to North Africa, never bothering to stress that they were equally if not more fully present in Europe or Asia as well. Perhaps most amusingly of all, Marty apologetically includes much of Eastern Europe in his first Asian chapter because to treat it where it technically belonged would be to put the European Orthodox in an episode with Rome rather than the with Constantinople. Then, in a radical about-face, all the Orthodox find themselves lumped into the second European episode “for convenience’ sake” and because they have “location and interests in Europe.” Had he been honest from the beginning, he would have made his divisions on the basis of where "interests" lay throughout the work.

Even as he moves into Latin, North American, and later Asian and African chapters where the focus is truly on continents and those continental divisions represent real cultural orientations, Marty's system remains an overemphasized organizational tool rather than a means for enriching the readers understanding of Christianity. Very little effort is made to link what makes, for example, Asian Christianity Asia or European Christianity European beyond merely their locations. The exceptions here are with Latin American Christianity and modern African Christianity, which Marty gives the kind of local flare necessary to a better understanding of Christianity as a global movement. Unfortunately, Marty's attempts to parrot this effort in North America fall into the old traps of too often artificially dividing the Atlantic world in the way he divided the Mediterranean one. The final Asian episode is the least fruitful, as the narrative told is less about Asian Christianity than about the failures of European Christianity in Asia. Even leaving aside that his tour of "all continents" neglects Oceania for all but one short paragraph near the end of the concluding chapter, there is a thriving indigenous Christianity in Asia that warrants further study.

The other major shortcoming of Marty's work--which I hope I can treat more briefly--is his never very subtle apology for inclusivism as the cure to Christianity's ills. In the Introduction, Marty has already begun, arguing that Christianity's greatest atrocities have been committed where exclusivist claims exist. Christianity has been an agent of love, he insists, but when it isn't, exclusivism is to blame. Assuming a causal relationship of necessity between exclusivism and evil misunderstands the connection. Exclusivism is only necessary for religion to function as a justification for evil. That it does not cause evil is evidenced by the persistence of evil even in the absence of religious exclusivism as a stated cause. Other exclusivist motives gladly take up the slack to justify what is ultimately a deeper impulse to evil: racial, national, and ideological exclusivism have all been marshaled to justify greater atrocities in the last century than religious exclusivism.

Of course, Marty never engages the issue that directly, preferring to let it hover beneath the surface, bubbling over in only slightly more subtle ways. His eulogistic praise of little known inclusivists like Bardesanes or the the “adventuresome” theologians after Vatican II who wanted to dialogue between Buddhists and Catholics until the fearful, censorious exclusivists silenced them. Marty contrasts Enlightenment figures who saw the “moral and humanitarian equivalence” of the Abrahamic faiths with “militant dogmatic Christians” who opposed them. He brings to the forefront as often as manageable and in the best light possible any movement which tended toward ecumenicism, inclusivism, or inter-faith dialogue. It is only in his concluding notes that he formally recognizes this bias, answering his own "so what" with a plea to allow interfaith dialogue to ameliorate conditions between rival religions. It is an interesting issue which warrants attention, but it is, nevertheless, grossly out of place in a condensed survey of Christian history. More to the point, the furtive way that Marty weaves it into the narrative, allowing it to color his reading of history only to pretend at the close that history has independently led the reader and writer both to a common conclusion, is, for lack of a more diplomatic and academic word, sleazy.

Yet, for all that, Marty's The Christian World is not a bad book. As noted from the outset, many of the complaints arise from heightened expectations based on the author's status. If the totally uninitiated reader picks up this text and reads it cover to cover--and it is a remarkably easy read, if a bit dull at times--he will emerge on the other side with substantially more hard data about Christian history. As a survey, there are better texts, ones not so hampered by the author's political agenda or marriage to an artificial, often distracting, methodology. As a look at Christianity's global character, it falls short in that it fails to recognize and study along real lines of cultural, political, and ideological distinction. The reader might have been better served--at least in this particular goal--by dropping the Mediterranean and Atlantic stories altogether, instead giving exclusive focus to India, Mongolia, Ethiopia, indigenous African and South American Pentecostalism, and Korea (among others). Of course, with its primary purpose being to survey all of Christian history, Marty clearly should instead have dropped the flawed methodology.

Though it may come as a shock, I do recommend Marty's book, to a limited audience and for perhaps more venal reasons. For those who have no concept of Christian history or have only a rudimentary grasp of post-Reformation Protestant history, the book is an acceptable survey to begin with. There are others, certainly, but to have a scholar of Marty's trustworthiness--and there are no grave errors in the book, other than interpretive ones (which are, of course, subjective)--as the author of a book that Amazon will let you have in hardcover for less than ten dollars (free shipping) is a blessing.

The Wisdom of John Howard Yoder

The following are merely three of what could have been numerous insightful quotes from John Howard Yoder's essay "War as a Moral Problem in the Early Church: The Historian's Hermeneutical Assumptions," in The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective:

God, the all-wise and all-powerful, is in charge of the world. We are not in charge of the course of events, responsible (as in most settings we are not able) to prevent atrocities or vindicate justice. WE need not defend ourselves; God has always protected his own, and will protect us in the future if that is his will. If it is not his will, our mobilizing for our own defense may be against his providential purpose. He may want to chastise us for our sins. Or He may want to use our suffering to 'sanctify his name,' that is, through martyrdom, the opposite of chastisement. If evil has its way, it is under God's permission and will not last. When he does triumph it will not be our doing and will not depend on our providing His troops. This is the explicit instruction of Rom. 12:19, leaving vengeance to God. This vision undercuts without needing to say so the consequentialism that is indispensable to the case for war in the name of social 'responsibility.'

Were Christians before Constantine pacifist? Certainly not, if we give the term an ahistorically modern definition. They did not advocate arms reduction negotiations nor an alternate world order that would do away with the occasion for war. The pax Romana in fact claimed already to be that. They were not consulted by Caesar about how to run the empire, since neither he nor they knew about 'the consent of the governed.' Thus, they neither asked Caesar to implement the non-violent Christian ethic from his throne nor measured the Christian ethic consequentially by whether it could be suited to run an empire. They did not refuse to serve when subject to universal conscription, since there was none. They accepted non-lethal work in the service of the peacetime military bureaucracy. Their clash with the military establishment was no rooted only in abhorrence of killing. Nor was it limited only to their abhorrence of idolatry. It was rooted in a fundamentally anti-tyrannical and anti-provincial vision of who God is and of God's saving purposes in the world.

Augustine's argument [for just war] is negative legalism, not a clear imperative. War cannot be forbidden, he argues, because John the Baptist did not forbid it, Jesus did not scold the centurion, Peter did not tell Cornelius to resign, God may have providentially subjected you to an ungodly king, Christian emperors have conquered pagan nations, and the world is miserable anyway. There is Augustine never a joyful Gospel confidence that bloodshed pleases or praises God...Augustine's mood was a 'mournful' pastoral adjustment to a world of which we cannot in any case ask that God's will be done. What has changed is not one ruling on what God's will is, but the entire setting in which doing God's will can be thought about. The Neoplatonic grid, according to which God's will cannot really be done, and the sociology of the imperial Church, according to which 'Christian' means everybody, have defined a whole different world.

Thanksgiving Family Forum

I track American politics in part because I think they are the most entertaining form of reality television and in part because, as someone who happens to live on American soil, they have a certain pragmatic relevance for me. Naturally, I have been watching the bevy of Republican debates and can honestly say that the Thanksgiving Family Forum, held in a church by a Christian organization, was by far the most painful to watch. For me, at least, the worst part isn't even difficult to isolate. It wasn't Rick Perry talking about the values "this country was based upon in Judeo-Christian founding fathers" (you remember, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Rabbi Goldberg). It wasn't even the extremely unsettling attempt by Rick Santorum to convert his infant daughter's struggle with almost certainly terminal Edwards Syndrome into politcal currency. It was this theologically disasterous thought by Michelle Bachmann:

I have a biblical worldview. And I think, going back to the Declaration of Independence, the fact that it’s God who created us—if He created us, He created government.

Let's forget for a moment that she claims a "biblical worldview" and immediately directs us to the Declaration of Independence and not the Bible and focus on what it means for theology to suggest that if God created us then He necessarily created human government. There are certainly theological systems (dreary, Calvinistic systems) which insist that it is appropriate to speak of God as the creator of everything we create because He created us. I wonder if Bachmann would be ready to endorse the implications of that theology (as so many of its more honest adherents are), that this makes God not only the author of civil government but also the author of various other sins like abortion, rape, nuclear war, and any other human malevolance imaginable. That logic paints a very scary picture, which is why so many of the rest of us are willing to accept a moral disconnect between what God has created and what we create as His creations.

The one bright moment in the whole affair is when Ron Paul contrasted the decentralized post-Exodus Israel and the centralized Israel of the kings, with the shift to the latter being (consistent with explicit biblical statements) perhaps the most destructive turn in Israelite history. His point, of course, was that human governments are nasty things that should be limited or avoided altogether when possible. The whole hermeneutical exercise had profound Lipscomb overtones--as Lipscomb would make a similar point in his works with the story of Samuel and Saul about the folly of civil government--though the two men arrive at very different ultimate conclusions. Delightfully, though Paul also endorsed the Augustinian view of just war (citing the saint by name), he admitted that just war theory is in tension with the experience of the early church and Christ's own emphasis on peace. For his own betterment (though perhaps not that of the American political landscape), I cannot help but hope that Paul will take that final ideological step and realize that government is so nasty that, as a Christian, he ought to just wash his hands of the whole endeavor.

Of course, then what would everyone be left with? Newt Gingrich and his profound answer to the worldwide Occupy Movement: "Go get a job, right after you take a bath."

Clean Monday

Scripture:


Mark 1:40-42

And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, "If you will, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, "I will; be clean." And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.

Isaiah 1:16-17

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
correct oppression;
bring justice to the fatherless,
plead the widow’s cause.

History:

Augustine, Confessions, 8.20

Finally in the agony of hesitation I made many physical gestures of the kind men make when they want to achieve something and lack the strength, either because they lack the actual limbs or because their limbs are fettered with chains or weak with sickness or in some way hindered. If I tore my hair, if I struck my forehead, if I intertwined my fingers and clasped my knee, I did that because to do so was my will. But I could have willed this and then not done it if my limbs had not possessed the power to obey. So I did many actions in which the will to act was not equaled by the power. Yet I was not doing what with an incomparably greater longing I yearned to do, and could have done at the moment I so resolved…The body obeyed the slightest inclination of the soul to move the limbs at its pleasure more easily than the soul obeyed itself…

Reflection:

The two Scriptures seem to convey very distinct messages. In Isaiah, God commands quite clearly that the Israelites cleanse themselves. He puts the burden of their moral degeneration and the responsibility for rectifying it solely on the heads of the people. In contrast, in Mark we see the leper approach the Lord and beg to be cleansed. Out of a movement of benevolent pity, Jesus cleanses the leper based on nothing more than his sincere request. These parallel tendencies appear throughout Scripture, both the call to cleanse oneself (2 Tim. 2:21) and the heartfelt plea to be cleansed (Ps. 51:10). Sin is both moral bankruptcy whose fault is ours alone and the pernicious disease which requires the salve of the Great Physician.

Augustine engages this paradox, if indirectly, in his turmoil in the throes of conversion. Alone in the garden, he struggles to understand why it is so easy to compel the body to move and yet so hard to compel the soul to will. He desires to be turned wholly to God, but his will is not so easy to move as his limbs. Paul, in Romans 7, depicts a similar struggle where he knows what he ought to will but his sinful nature wills something else. Both realize that we are both responsible for willing what is good and incapable of truly actualizing that will unaided.

As Lent begins today, this tension is critical to understanding the heart of the fast. On the one hand, we know that we are called to purify our lives: not merely to remove vice but to pursue virtue. The ethical demands which God makes of His people are tremendous, and we are expected to conform ourselves to them. At the same time, we are utterly insufficient. The goodness of God is infinite, and no matter how thoroughly we make attempts to conform to it, our efforts are finite. By their very nature, they could never suffice to make us pure.

So we dedicate this time to purification and to prayer, two sides of the same theological coin: our need for cleansing. Let neither aspect be neglected. This time is an opportunity for reevaluation and rededication but also for renewed fervency in prayer and humility. The more we relinquish to God, the more we realize how dependent we were on Him all along.

Prayer:

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin!

For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you may be justified in your words
and blameless in your judgment.

Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will return to you.
Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God,
O God of my salvation,
and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.
O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;
you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

--Ps. 51:1-4,13-17

Holy and Great Thursday

The name in Western churches today is Maundy Thursday, derived from a Latin reference to Jesus washing of the disciples feet. Continuing the theme of humility begun yesterday, there could hardly be a more appropriate image on which to focus. The vast differences in human responses to God have been considered, ranging from self-abasement at the feet of God to the greatest hubris whereby the created presumes to destroy the Creator . Yet, Jesus Christ, in God's infinitely wise ways, loves us before we loved him and humbles himself to us before we humbled ourselves to him. He provides for us an example for all time. When Mary anointed Jesus' feet at Bethany she gave him infinitely less than was his due. When Jesus washed the feet of the disciples, he lowered himself to a position so diametrically opposed to his actual station that to consider it ought to be laughable to us.

Nevertheless, God's "folly" has given us a profound lesson in humility. Our humility is not to be the result of a calculated appraisal of our worth relative to others. We do not realize that we are less than God, and be humble towards him, only to decide that we are better than some of our peers and feel justified in our arrogant treatment of them. Jesus has demonstrated that humility is a state of being before God, a commitment to the service of God through the service of His entire creation. It isn't based on our quantifiable worthlessness but on his unquantifiable worthiness.

Thus, Augustine exhorts:

Pride is the source of all diseases, because pride is the source of all sins...Therefore, that the cause of all diseases might be cured, namely pride, the Son of God came down and was made humble. Why are you proud, o man? God was made humble for you. Perhaps you would be ashamed to imitate a humble man; at least imitate a humble God.*

*Quoted from Joseph M. Hallman's The Descent of God.