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the Jesus Manifesto
following the way of Jesus in the land of our captivity
During his long resistance to the British empire, Mohandas Gandhi gave the world one of the most widely known quotes of twentieth-century politics: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If you want a world without war, stop fighting wars. It is, to be highfalutin about it, something of a teleological moral [...]
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Of course, the Christians of India believe that Ghandi was not true to his own ideals because he never left Hinduism. Hinduism continued to dehumanize according to caste making Ghandi's ultimate desires impossible. This is where it would have been much better to work from a Kingdom perspective provided by Christianity. So, I agree with what you are saying but just look at Ghandi's call a little differently based on his context.
11 months ago
http://paceebene.org/blog/jarrod-mckenna/gandhi...
I’ve got a workshop that is really close to what you’ve been writing!! Spooky! (Not that spooky considering the shared influences.) The way we put it is “equipping a generation to ‘walk-out’ now what God wills the world to be”. :)
Hey if you’re interested here is my series on Gandhi that I did last year:
http://paceebene.org/blog/jarrod-mckenna/gandhi...
grace and peace for the journey of walking the world to come out now,
jarrod
11 months ago
Gandhi's nonviolence (satyagraha, or holding onto truth) was based in the idea that ultimately love and truth IS God. I think to wedge him as being individualistic or having "his own" moral vision is therefore unfair. That's part of why nonviolence was so important - because it is a way of arriving at truth (or closer to it), and potentially discovering that the truth to which you hold/grasp is actually untruth and needs to be let go of. Truth (God) was therefore seen as something outside of himself (AND inside himself) which he arrived at through nonviolence because it's always possible that your opponent has the truth and you have the untruth ("everyone has a piece of the truth and the untruth...") Hence "be the change _you_ wish to see" - because if you go about it nonviolently you'll eventually arrive discover whether "the change you wish to see" is the truth (ie. God) or not.
It was therefore not merely "his" moral vision at all, but the vision of truth and love, which Gandhi would call God, that Gandhi sought - hence the subtitle of his autobiography "the stories of my experiments with truth".
That activists and others have twisted it to their own devices is, I think, not to be attributed to Gandhi, nor is it surprising.
So my sense (I could be wrong - is this my piece of the truth or the untruth? ;)) is that Gandhi wouldn't be particularly bothered by your modification of it, as it's using different language to describe the same thing...and that to wedge him towards an individualistic interpretation of that particular statement and away from God's-vision is to take the rest of his work out of context.
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A contextual Gandhi is, as Simon says, trying to counterbalance a lowest-common-denominator passivity that waits for god/God/YHWH to effect 'the change' rather than going ahead and participating the change. I recently heard a discussion on the UK's BBC Radio 4 programme 'Beyond Belief' suggesting just that - in precis, the Church's duty was not to be just another NGO but was to pray for divine mercy, which is true but mere prayer is not much use to the malnourished and diseased, who rather need those who will instantiate divine mercy with food, medicines, aid, (fair) trade, policy, diplomacy, peacemaking, etc., etc.
I would argue what is needed is a zen-like balance between competing perspectives on the same question …
One direction of view is that we must understand the change god/God would make (has already made in Jesus' life-death-and-resurrection). In other words, we must inhabit the missio Dei.
A second perspective is that, as people blown by the spirit/Spirit, I must be the change I want to see. Importantly, the parameters of that change are utterly contingent on the spiritual life.
And the third perspective is that we must live a communal life - _we_ must be the change _we_ want to see. Brandon's argument may not necessarily be liberated from the western filter you identify, Mark, I fear. If there are just two poles - individual <=> God - then that is still the same trapdoor opening beneath our argumentation. The three lines of sight are needed for a full view of the necessary change.
I would argue that Gandhi was indeed holding this tension correctly, though this is hard to see when he is decontextualised. As Simon says, satyagraha is a divinely mediated modus operandum - even a modicum of reading on Gandhi's arguments would see that. Nonetheless, Gandhi's aphorism is a challenge to perceive the role of (the) individual(s) in divine change - if we leave it up to god/God, how will it ever get done? But, and this is the vital context, he says it in the midst of mid-Twentieth Century India, a society which was corporately and communally framed, a society whose natural reflex would tend to read you as second person plural - you people, rather than you person.
I believe you're right about Gandhi, Mark. I hope you're right about Brandon's argument as well.
11 months ago
At least a few claps for Ghandi's statement. Infinite claps for Jesus' works!
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"Nonviolence is a power that can be wielded equally by all - children, young men and women or grown up people - provided they have a living faith in the God of Love and have therefore equal love for all mankind. When nonviolence is accepted as the law of life it must pervade the whole being and not be applied to isolated acts." Mohandas K Ghandi (cited in Harijan, September 5, 1936; from A Peace Reader: Essential Readings on War, Justice, Non-Violence and World Order [J. J. Fahet and R. Armstrong (eds); New York: Paulist, 1992], 174).
Critically evaluate this view and those of Christians who embrace non-violence.
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Those are good words, and I'm glad to have read them. When Jesus returns to wipe away the Age of Sin and bring the Kingdom of God to full realization all violence, exploitation, and greed will be no more.
Your post reminds me of Richard B. Hays' book entitled The Moral Vision of the New Testament. Hays talks a lot about our behaviors which are unethical in God's eyes (and therefore unethical, period) will have no place in the coming kingdom, so we should seek to correct those now.
I'm grateful that God loves his enemies. I was pretty big one for awhile.
11 months ago
Great Blog. I just recently found your site off of another friend's. This opened my mind and heart completely to see that Gandhi was not correct. I just love the new quote "Be the change God will eventually make in the world." In fact, as I was reading along, before I came to the spot where you re-quoted Gandhi, I personally had re-worded the quote myself. I'd said "Be the change God wants to see in the world."
In any case, you totally hit the nail on the head in many aspects of this article. "It is the life of the change that God will one day make in the world. Or, more properly, that He is already making...The Age to Come has begun in the person of Jsus, and continues in the life of His Church....The Spirit is given to begin the work of making God's future real in the present.
I look forward to spending much more time here at Jesus Manifesto reading you and the other writers' Blogs.
~Amy
www.myspace.com/amyinsurprise
11 months ago
Now if only I could find a way to dial all this down into something to present my sunday school class this week as we study Colossians 1:9-23.
11 months ago
I am a bit confused on this issue.... Does God see his bride as perfect, as we are "In Christ" and therefore as "Christ is so are we"
or does God see the ecclessia's behavior as unethical and not worthy of the kingdom, therefore she must change her ways?
11 months ago
To me this is incredably exciting and freeing. At times I struggle with anger, materialism, jealousy (as in coveting) and other sins (lust, self-centeredness, hoarding, etc), but because of the hope I have in Christ's work, I can wake up everyday, consider myself dead to sin and alive in Christ, and try again to live in the freedom that makes all those sins absolutely ridiculous.
Of course this does not we sit around waiting for God to provide or ignore sin when Christian's sin (note that we are only called to address a Christian's sin, 1 Cor 5:9-13). Christians are still called to work diligently (1 Thess 4:11-12), but here we are also called to live quietly, mind our own affairs (as Christians) and not to be dependant on outsiders, so that we can live properaly before them (in the ESV it says to be dependant on "no one," but I understand this to mean not depedant on outsiders as clearly there was interdependance in the early church).
I believe we can do all of these things because of the security we have in Christ. Brandon's language, which you re-typed, is a little bit absolutist for my taste. I don't think war was always completely "unethical" and it is understandable that those who are still blind to Christ's lordship would choose to engage in it from time to time, but we, as followers of Christ, should be the light that points to his lordship (calling people into his kingdom of peace and reconciliation), for us to act as if we still blind to that, as if we are still living in the old way (before Christ) is senseless.
11 months ago
11 months ago
I've been thinking a lot about what you've written. You said we should be "the change God will make in the world". I agree with that statement. However, it presupposes I know what that change is; that I know the mind of God. To some degree, we can understand the mind of God through reading the Bible. Somethings are obvious and all Christians agree on them. There are quite a number of things that the Christian community does not agree upon, the extent to which one should practice non-violence being one of them. To say that a person knows that God does not want any violence seems to me that you are claiming greater knowledge of God's intentions than your peers.
It seems like if you were to leave Ghandi's statement the way it was then your understanding of God's intentions could be interpreted as your personal beliefs rather than an attack against someone else's beliefs.
I was also wondering about your diagram of Christ being revealed and God's kingdom coming into full glory. Do you see that happening during the thousand year reign of Christ or when Christ returns?
11 months ago
No, it's reiterating the Scriptural eschatological vision of God's peace and kingdom being one in which the lion and lamb lie next to one another, when swords are beat into plowshares. The change God will make in the world is one in which violence is no longer practiced; I don't think that's really a point that is questioned. I think the better question, that you may be intimating, is how the church embodies/does not embody the change God will make in the world.
The claim Brandon is making, and that the NT makes as well, is that the kingdom of God has been inaugurated in the very person of Jesus. The new age has dawned, although because it exists concurrently with the old age, the new awaits consummation. By the power of the Spirit the church can embody the change God will make in the world because that change has already begun...our refusal to practice nonviolence even in the overlap of the ages suggests we resist the coming of the kingdom of God and instead find ourselves in collusion with the rebellious powers of the old age.
11 months ago
The eschatological focus is connected to the circumstance of oppression: freedom from oppression was available existentially in the liberating and supportive practices of the church, whereas ontological freedom from oppression -- what we might call "revolution" -- was deferred eschatologically, to take place at the hand of God. Throwing off the yoke of oppression through violence -- roughly, the Zealot option -- was rejected.
This becomes complicated for two reasons. One, most of us are not oppressed or associated significantly with people groups that are. This means that our theologizing is taking place in a bubble of power and privilege and relative security that is alien to the NT's early audience. True, the wealthy and powerful were not unknown among the early Christians, but the overall makeup of the early Christians as a group was quite different from the demographics of contemporary Christianity. This is nothing to feel guilty about, but it is a difference. Many of the questions we ask presume our position, not theirs.
The second complication is that it is not entirely clear how Jesus' response to oppression translates into a reaction to the "random acts of violence" often referred to in discussing the limits of nonviolence. In previous discussions none of us offered responses that take "do not resist an evil person" altogether literally, partially because even to the ardent pacifist this seems too quietistic and partially (perhaps) because the "evil person" presumed by Jesus and his audience was most likely a Roman soldier (or some other symbol of oppression) and less likely a garden variety dark-alley attacker.
I think we would do well to admit and embrace this ambiguity. The pacifist position is attractive for its consistency at a certain level, and for the clarity that is afforded by simplicity. It is defensible, but it is not a slam-dunk. Maria is right to invoke the difficulty of interpretation, and I would suggest that "Some things are obvious and all Christian agree on them" is probably still too optimistic. :)
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More seriously: I think the primary context of things like "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you", or the whole cheek/cloak/extra mile montage, or similar admonitions from Paul, including his quote from the OT, "'Vengeance is mine; I will repay,' says the Lord", or not waging war against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, or how their weapons were not of this world, and so forth, is a call for YHWH-worshipping communities not to respond to oppression with violence.
And I'm not sure this means "non-violence against", if the use of "against" is anything more than an arbitrary word choice. It's more like non-violence in contrast to, which is one way of trying to make sure that resistance doesn't simply become the very thing it is fighting. Historically, of course, this is what happened: if there really was a pristine non-violent believing community, it lost the struggle to define Christianity, which became a recapitulation of Empire (most of it still is).
As for Ananias and Sapphira, I haven't thought of that story in this light. Mostly it seems to be a cautionary tale about proper (and honest) participation in the community. Apparently sharing property had enough cachet that A&S wanted to at least look like they were doing so, but their dishonesty is judged. It is, however, God who does the judging, and I don't think this is inconsistent with Paul's insistence that judgment is the exclusive prerogative of God, denied to the church.
Peter may be the moutpiece in this instance, and as much as might look like he force-choked them like Darth Vader (which makes the episode much more interesting), that's clearly not the case and I'm not sure it has altogether that much to do with the keys of kingdom (unless the whole pericope is really a sensationalist way of narrating a much more mundane process of communal discernment, but then I'm showing my 'liberal' cards...).
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11 months ago
I think I see a clash here between a way of thinking about ethics that presupposes it to be about universal application (which is the normal way of thinking about ethics), and a particularist ethics that seeks to work out how the church is to behave as the vanguard of the eschaton. I assumed that Brandon was speaking only to the latter.
Christian ethics is normative only to the extent that it prefigures and participates in the life of the age to come. To the extent that such an age has not come in fulness, there will always be the world, against which the church defines itself and for which the church exists (in both cases, this is because the church wages war against the principalities and powers to which the world is held captive; it does so by embodying the alternative).
The world might learn from the church, which bears witness to the reign of God, but it cannot fully embrace the church's ethics or calling without becoming the church (which would not be such a bad thing, but is not likely to happen).
By the same token, the church cannot undertake actions that are necessary for the world without becoming the world, or becoming problematically of the world -- which is to say, becoming (or remaining) captive to the very powers against which it should be fighting.
11 months ago
As to the millennial reign question: remember that kingdom language in the New Testament isn't strictly talking about a future time. It is, but it's also talking about that future age coming into the present. Think of when cookies are baked in the kitchen, and the very taste of those cookies waffs through the house to you in an whole different room.
Same kinda thing. God was planning to launch his kingdom project for millennia. In Christ, the oven has figuratively reached cooking temperature and the dough's been put in. Now all creation has been filled somehow --somehow!-- with the aroma of that dawning New Creation. And we are, to keep the analogy going in a way that meets up with Paul, the aroma of Christ waffing through the house and drawing people to that heavenly oven, eagerly awaiting for the baking timer to click, and the cookies to come out in "full glory."
And the best part is, we get some advance tastes of those cookies, even as the fullness of that yummy plate o goodness is still being readied. In the Holy Spirit, in the Word, in Baptism, in the Lord's Supper, and so many other ways, we are getting advance tastes of the coming Cookies of Glory.
If you're premill and are still awaiting a 1000-year deal between the "church age" and "new heavens, new earth", (as your question seems to tip your hand as being) then I think that my article's basic idea still works, this overlap of the ages or this inbreaking aroma of God's future.
And now, dang, I want some cookies before I hit the hay...
11 months ago
Biologically, God uses violence to maintain the peace of his creation. Scientifically, it seems, God uses violence to make his creation, although I'm not sure I would go as far as he authors that violence. But the very nature of death, embedded in the laws of entropy, are what is necessary for there to be life in this system.
And I don't think you read me right on the premil stuff, (I'm not sure, though, as I don't understand all the in's and out's of various theological persuasions). Would it be safe to assume that God's kindom would be expressed to it's fullest extent on earth (in it's present unregenerated form) during the thousand year reign of Christ?
11 months ago
Perhaps a better title would be why we're wrong about Ghandi.
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