“jesus for president” and a reconstruction of faith
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.â€
~mahatma gandhi
i mentioned earlier that my computer meltdown ate the lengthy post i was composing on my latest read, “jesus for president” by shane claiborne and chris haw. while that quelled my desire to re-hash my thoughts for quite a while, it may have had a beneficial effect in that it gave me more time to mull things over, think about my opinions, talk with people, and dissect the book. in the comments of my last related post, my friend curtis pointed out that it seems that shane supposes the premise that christians should be pacificsts. and he does in a way, but the book is also devoted in large part to investigating the reasons WHY this should be our conclusion. but let me start at the beginning, in as much as i’m able. i knew i was going to like the book - at least a little! - when it started like this:
“You grew up in a good family; hardworking dad and a mom who was there when you needed her. They taught you and your little brother to share and showed you how to pray every night before you went to bed. In Sunday school, you learned about Jesus and sang all the songs with the rest of the kids. There was Noah and his ark, Moses and the Ten Commandments, and little baby Jesus asleep on the hay. You learned about the blessing that was America and were grateful to live in a country led by good Christian leaders. With a hand over your heart or above your brow, you pledged allegiance to God and Country, for the Lord was at work in this holy nation. But lately you are beginning to wonder if this is really how God intended things to be. And you question if God is really working through places of power. Maybe, you wonder, God had a totally different idea in mind . . .”
if that isn’t one of the most succinct ways to describe most of my upbringing to a “T”, i don’t know what is. i’ve been on a spiritual path (though i guess we all are!) away from the evangelicalism of my background and “traditional” christianity for many years now - so no surprise there. lately i’ve found myself - sometimes plodding slowly, sometimes careening - toward a place where this path would become much more tangible - where the “rubber” of my intangible journey would meet the “road” of my cut-and-dried daily life. but i didn’t know - nor am i sure yet - how this would look. to tell the truth, i resisted writing this type of post earlier (before i even read the book) because i was afraid people would take it at as my magnum opus for abandoning the faith of my childhood. as points of clarification going forward:
1). i am not abandoning *faith,* i’m not questioning the fundamental principles of my theology - i did that already in college (thanks mother biola). though i’m sure some would disagree with me on what these fundamentals are, and the importance/unimportance i place on various components of faith - and if that’s the case, i’d LOVE to have a discussion on it!
2). i think - for those of us lucky enough, or cursed enough (depending on how you look at it …) to be raised religiously - sloughing off certain components of this religiosity is imperative to making faith our own. in this regard, abandoning the “faith of my childhood” is not all bad.
whew. ok. with those basics out of the way, let’s get to the book. one of the themes that stood out to me was how we have confused being christian with being american. this is why the “national day of prayer” angers me. it’s why i was offended and infuriated when people got so up-in-arms at the (patently false, propaganda-ized) suggestion that obama was a muslim. (so what if he was? i hope i live to see a non-christian leader in a country that was founded on RELIGIOUS FREEDOM … but i digress.) come to think of it, it’s why a LOT of things really goad me, and i don’t need to get into the litany of reasons why i’m bothered, in large part, by americanized christianity.
the idea here is that we are actually called to do the OPPOSITE of what many well-meaning christian groups would have us believe. we are not to force a top-down diffusion of our beliefs but rather to enact a grassroots, bottom-up approach to faith that is quite separate from our cultures, but also quite relevant to the problems society faces. it meets people WHERE THEY ARE.
lest we think that this “separatism” gets us off the hook for caring for our world, and gives us a ticket to sit back, watch and wait while the world goes to hell in a handbasket - thinking “it all has to get worse, anyway, before it goes down in a firey blaze of glory” - we are sadly mistaken. (as i’ve mentioned before.) the reason we’re called to be separate is to be MORE RELEVANT to the people who need our message the most. america - or any nation - “christianized” or not - is not the answer to the evils of this world, and if we believe our faith, our love, our belief system truly is the answer, we demonstrate this in the ways jesus did.
what he gave the early christians was not a way to become a part of the roman empire, but a way to rebel against it - peacefully of course - by seeking to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth through tangible means
shane and chris write:
[The early church] community was more than just a group of people who shared religious beliefs. They were a group of people that embodied a new way of living, the way out of the empire, where slavery, poverty, war, and oppression were normal. They were to become the salt and the light of the world. The credibility of their gospel would rest on the integrity of their lives. For they were now to be the body of Christ. Jesus would live in them.
as one blogger/reviewer put it:
Jesus for President wonders if the reason the American church does not articulate a Christianity distinct from national citizenship is that we have lost our godly imagination. Or perhaps we have become so used to living with power and privilege that we are hesitant to articulate a different way of living.
as i at turns plod and careen toward this different way of living, i think it’s important to re-evaluate the assumptions we make about our beliefs and the things we take for granted as hard-and-fast truths. next up: pacifism.
June 17 2009 08:00 am | politics and religion