Jerry
On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Dwayne Monroe <dwayne.monroe at gmail.com> wrote:
> I heartily recommend "God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and
> Now" which holds treasure for believers and non-believers alike:
>
>
> <http://www.amazon.com/God-Empire-Jesus-Against-Rome/dp/0060843233>
>
>
> Its subject is especially timely in light of the recent dust up over
> Rev. Wright's strong challenge to media caricatures and Sen. Obama's
> realpolitik denunciation of his former pastor.
>
> BTW, if you haven't already done so, I suggest you read the full
> transcript of the Reverend's appearance before the Natl. Press Club:
>
> <
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/us/politics/28text-wright.html?_r=1&ref=politics&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
> >
>
>
> It's a masterful presentation.
>
>
> About the Obama/Wright brouhaha, Charles Brown wrote:
>
> ...how tragic that Rev. Wright (a follower of Jesus, whose story
> emphasized forgiveness ) didn't use this opportunity to let his anger
> go ( he had adequately expressed it and correct criticisms of
> America), and make a speech on racial reconciliation and forgiveness;
> take his lead from Obama. Sure it's true that US has had Indian
> genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, etc. But is there any future in
> treating racism as permanent? The profound hope of O's campaign is
> once again dreaming Martin Luther King's dream, without denying
> history.
>
> [...]
>
>
> Which, on the face of it, seems reasonable. If you look more closely
> however, questions arise.
>
> Charles -- like many others -- assumes that Wright's challenge to, and
> unflinching description of white supremacy and imperial violence comes
> from little else than "anger". In fact, it's the core of a consistent
> and well reasoned *liberation theology* response to ongoing forms of
> oppression. Like Charles, many commentators are saying that Wright,
> as a follower of Christ, should stop mentioning American sins and,
> adhering to Sen. Obama's 'vision', focus on 'hope' and
> 'reconciliation'. (Ironically, many of these newborn theologians are
> otherwise unconcerned about the finer points of Christian thought).
>
> This is an attractive argument if, for no other reason, because
> obeying its reasoning would ruffle far fewer feathers. But it's a plea
> to put a fresh coat of paint on a neglected and decaying building:
> covering the glaring evidence of trouble without actually fixing a
> thing.
>
> This is precisely the opposite of the revolutionary message of Jesus
> which even a secularist such as myself can eagerly applaud. Indeed,
> as Crossan's "God and Empire..." asserts, Christ's goal was to
> supplant the brutal Roman world with the 'kingdom of heaven' through
> peaceful means.
>
> Fundamentalists typically describe this replacement as being achieved
> via the 'second coming' or the rapture (events which, paradoxically
> for people who often talk about peace, are enthusiastically
> anticipated because of the punishing violence thought to accompany
> them). Crossan argues that Christ was talking about a more earthly,
> less cosmically explosive, but no less dramatic process: the imperial
> system was to be undone, step by step, via the unprecedented creation
> of a new paradigm, centered on love. By its very nature, Christ's
> vision of mutual aid and submission to one another was a challenge to
> Roman concepts of harsh competition, martial virtue and 'peace' via
> war and subjugation (wasn't it Tacitus who said, "where they [Rome]
> make a desert, they call it peace"?).
>
> Bringing this back to Obama/Wright, we can see that our modern Rome
> cannot be transformed into something better by whitewashing the truth
> about its nature. To be faithful to not only Christ's message but his
> deeper goal, you cannot shrink from calling the invasion of Iraq a
> crime. You cannot settle for saying, as most people do, that it was
> merely a 'mistake'. Would Jesus be so careful? The trouble is, when
> you say 'crime' instead of 'mistake' you're vulnerable to charges of
> radicalism and wild-eyed anger.
>
> And this is what Rev. Wright has done and why he has been vilified; he
> has used the word 'crime' where it should be used. He has called
> 'supremacy by its right name instead of covering it with sugar.
> During his Natl. Press Club speech, the Reverend said:
>
>
> <snip>
>
> I call our faith tradition, however, the prophetic tradition of the
> black church, because I take its origins back past [theologian] Jim
> Cone, past the sermons and songs of Africans in bondage in the
> transatlantic slave trade. I take it back past the problem of Western
> ideology and notions of white supremacy.
>
> I take and trace the theology of the black church back to the prophets
> in the Hebrew Bible and to its last prophet, in my tradition, the one
> we call Jesus of Nazareth.
>
> The prophetic tradition of the black church has its roots in Isaiah,
> the 61st chapter, where God says the prophet is to preach the gospel
> to the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive.
> Liberating the captives also liberates who are holding them captive.
>
> It frees the captives and it frees the captors. It frees the oppressed
> and it frees the oppressors.
>
> The prophetic theology of the black church, during the days of chattel
> slavery, was a theology of liberation. It was preached to set free
> those who were held in bondage spiritually, psychologically, and
> sometimes physically. And it was practiced to set the slaveholders
> free from the notion that they could define other human beings or
> confine a soul set free by the power of the gospel.
>
> [...]
>
>
> and later,
>
>
> God's desire is for positive, meaningful and permanent change. God
> does not want one people seeing themselves as superior to other
> people. God does not want the powerless masses, the poor, the widows,
> the marginalized, and those underserved by the powerful few to stay
> locked into sick systems which treat some in the society as being more
> equal than others in that same society.
>
> God's desire is for positive change, transformation, real change, not
> cosmetic change, transformation, radical change or a change that makes
> a permanent difference, transformation. God's desire is for
> transformation, changed lives, changed minds, changed laws, changed
> social orders, and changed hearts in a changed world.
>
> This principle of transformation is at the heart of the prophetic
> theology of the black church. These two foci of liberation and
> transformation have been at the very core of the black religious
> experience from the days of David Walker, Harriet Tubman, Richard
> Allen, Jarena Lee, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, and Sojourner Truth,
> through the days of Adam Clayton Powell, Ida B. Wells, Dr. Martin
> Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Barbara Jordan, Cornell West, and
> Fanny Lou Hamer.
>
> [...]
>
>
>
> These aren't the words of a man who's trapped by "anger" but rather,
> the words of a man who is challenging his country to face its actual
> self, to cast away its cherished mythology of perfection, and move
> forward.
>
>
> ...
>
>
>
> Sen. Obama's objective is to become president of the United States,
> the nation which to this day remains, to quote Dr. King, "the greatest
> purveyor of violence in the world..." A POTUS' job, stripped of
> distracting pomp and circumstance, is to act as manager of a vast
> system of power preservation and expansion. Just as Augustus (who
> Gibbon called, "that crafty tyrant"), though remaining faithful to the
> ideas energizing Roman tyranny, was a better, less destructive emperor
> than Nero, Obama -- if elected -- may yet prove to be a better, and
> perhaps even less destructive, manager than his competitors.
>
> That's important, and a reasonable rationale for supporting his
> candidacy. Still, even as we gift Sen. Obama with more benefit of the
> doubt than his opponents (and this generosity must be interrogated) we
> should heed Christ's admonition, stated in Matthew 10:16 - "Behold, I
> send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise
> as serpents, and harmless as doves." (KJV).
>
> Those of us who're calling upon Rev. Wright to be quiet or, at best,
> to parrot Obama's rhetoric of 'reconciliation' over and above the more
> thorough, liberation theology vision of 'transformation' are --
> whether we realize it or not -- demanding that he split Jesus' advice
> in two: retaining the dove's harmlessness while losing the serpent's
> wisdom.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> .d.
> ___________________________________
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>
-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
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