Proclaiming the Resurrection is Profoundly Political – Paul M. van Buren on “Religion,” “Politics,” and the True “Spirituality” of Easter

By -
I present the following without comment, except to supply an enthusiastic “Awwwwww, yeah!”

Seriously, though, Paul van Buren’s work – all of it – deserves to be - and needs to be - much more widely read today. Bold is mine in the below.

Paul M. van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality: Part III, Christ in Context (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 129–30.

Distant Shores Media/Sweet Publishing [CC BY-SA 3.0],
via Wikimedia Commons
The apostolic witness to Easter is insistent that the risen one is no other than the crucified one. But crucifixion was unquestionably the official form of public execution for political crimes, primarily for rebellion against the political power of the Roman empire. To proclaim Jesus alive, therefore, was a profoundly political act. It was to affirm God’s reaffirmation of one who died in conflict with the misuse of political power and so to affirm God’s cause in the just use of human power. That was the “spiritual” import of Easter faith.

Easter, then, was “spiritual” in the precise sense of being an event of God’s persistence in directing and enticing his creation towards his own purpose for its own good. It was spiritual in the precise sense of being part of God’s worldly concern for this world. It was spiritual in being a piece of this world directed in the service of God’s spirit. To call it spiritual in some other sense — perhaps in the sense of being immaterial, unworldly, not a part of the history in which this world has to do with God — would be to see it quite otherwise.

Yet just this happened in the history of the Church, with the result that it is common for Christian’s today to think of “religion” and “politics” as antithetical terms, areas of existence and points of reference that can have nothing to do with each other. So Easter and the cross itself are extracted from the political world in which they happened, and the seriousness of God’s conflict with this world and the misuse of human power is diminished. With that conflict no longer centered in the heart of human activity — the exercise of power and the workings of the political ordering of human affairs — its focus was reduced to that of human sin conceived of primarily as individual failures on the personal level. So conceived, Jesus is seen to have died only for the personal sins of the individual. He is no longer a victim of God’s conflict with the injustices of the Roman Empire, and he is risen only into the personal faith of the individual believer in his or her personal salvation, no longer the living evidence of God’s persistence in pushing his cause for the sake of a better ordering, and therefore unavoidably a better political ordering, of his creation. A Church so oriented will of course take personal sins seriously, but it will be all too free to do so in blindness to the massive sin of the misuse of human power which manifests itself primarily in the social, political, and economic order[*] (and here we give credit to the Liberation theologians for seeing this so clearly). … If Easter was not a worldly victory, as it clearly was not, then let it become a spiritual victory. The world can go its own way. Thus is God’s conflict with this world restricted to the private and the power of God for making this world right reduced to the realm of personal development and fulfillment. This new “privatized gospel”[**] may serve the cause of a church wishing to gain a hearing in a bourgeois culture. It can hardly serve the cause of God in the service of which Jesus was crucified and in confirmation of which he was raised.

[*] I can’t help commenting: See how clearly PMvB diagnoses the basic dynamic at play in evangelical Christianity in the United States in the second decade of the 20th century, nearly 30 years after he wrote this!

[**] We’re one short step here from saying “commodified gospel.”

==================================


Subscribe to Die Evangelischen Theologen

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

So You Want to Read….Dietrich Bonhoeffer?

By -
Image
"I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven." "The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community…may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door." "Since ethical thinking in terms of realms is overcome by faith in the revelation of the ultimate reality in Jesus Christ . . . there is no real Christian existence outside the reality of the world." "People who reject their bodies reject their existence before God the Creator." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer Prelude Andreas Steinhoff [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons I envisioned having a lot of time for blogging this summer, but that simply has not been the case - the last month has been a crazy one, to say the least. For two weeks, I was working at a theology summer camp of sorts, the Duke Youth Academy, and s...
Keep reading

So, You Want To Read Karl Barth?

By -
Image
Every now and then I am asked for advice about studying Karl Barth. So, I thought that I would share some of my standard advice here. But, before I do that, let me just say that I am by no means a Barth expert as compared to the people whose books I will mention below. I would be thrilled to find myself in their league one day, but as of yet that remains a distant dream. Still, I have been reading Barth for long enough, and under the supervision of a number of the scholars that I will mention below, that I think I can provide a decent orientation. I have never read Karl Barth before. Which of his books should I read first? Barth’s most famous work is the monumental 13-volume Church Dogmatics . Reading the CD with understanding is not an easy thing, so you definitely do NOT want to start here. Luckily, there are two smaller works by Barth that serve as helpful introductions to his work. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction - Based on the lectures that Barth delivered duri...
Keep reading

Karl Barth on Hell, the Devil, Demons, and Universalism – A Florilegium

By -
Image
You know, all the most interesting topics. Although Barth often confessed that he didn’t find these questions particularly interesting. At best they might draw sideways glances, as it were, as one travels the theological road. But I found a number of places in the records of Barth’s later conversations that I thought folks might find interesting, so I’ve collected them here. And if you aren’t familiar with the term “florilegium,” here you go ! All these texts are from the first volume of Barth in Conversation , with pages numbers given in parentheses along the way. As usual, italics are in the text and bold is mine. Hell “Now we come to hell. You shouldn’t laugh! There is nothing to laugh at! What does hell mean? I think hell means to be in the place where you are once fore all damned and lost without ceasing to exist, without losing the image of God, being what you are but being damned and lost, separated from God, whose creature you are, separated also from your neighbor, from...
Keep reading

George Hunsinger’s gloss of the Christ Hymn in Philippians 2

By -
Image
I’ve been reading George Hunsinger’s (my doktorvater , for anyone who might be new around here) entry in the Brazos Theoloical Commentary on the Bible series on Philippians. Anyone who has studied with George will find this book to be a compendium and application of many of his most characteristic and beloved analytical tools and patterns, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. But one of the things that really stood out to me was how he glossed the so-called “Christ hymn” of Philippians 2. George Hunsinger, Philippians , Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: BrazosPress, 2020). The gloss that Hunsinger provides is not a historical-critical interpretation. Rather, it is an ecclesial, ecumenical, and theological interpretation that attempts to fill in the blanks for how to understand this proto-liturgical formulation in light of the later formulations of the ecumenical creeds. In order to achieve this gloss, Hunsinger engages in “ecclesial hermeneutics” and makes “...
Keep reading

2010 KBBC: Week 3, Day 1

By -
On the Monstrosity of Christ : Karl Barth in Conversation with Slavoj Žižek & John Milbank By Paul Dafydd Jones For a while, I hoped to frame this conversation in terms of a dramatic interchange – something along the lines of “A Slovenian philosopher, a British theologian, and a Swiss dogmatician walk into a bar…” Alongside an eye-wateringly hip assemblage of cinematic references, literary allusions, and comedic scenes – my early favorites being when Barth imagines a young adult novel, entitled Are you there God? It’s me, Žižek , and when Milbank waxes poetic about the Twilight movies – I wanted to engage some topics that would likely receive attention, were the authors to meet for drinks. Primarily, I envisioned an intense discussion of the logos asarkos and the logos ensarkos , with Milbank talking up the former category, Barth emphasizing the latter, and Žižek asking whether recent debates are but symptoms of secret puzzle, embedded in the Church Dogmatics – a puzzle that...
Keep reading