On Aggression

It seems to me that a major characteristic of American Christianity has been its aggressiveness, it love of conflict. This is  true of the Evangelical tradition in what became the battleground where the Evangelical empire of the Spirit has fought the empire of Science. The central complaint since the birth cries of evangelicalism first broke into the world has been that liberalism in the tradition of Schleiermacher gave away too much in satisfying the demands of the cultured despisers of religion. He, and all the liberals that followed, surrendered too easily to the dominant culture. So from Barth’s Dogmatics through Newbigin's The Foolishness of the Greeks, the battle has been joined in a culture that revels in conflict and believes that truth most likely emerges in an adversarial encounter between competing claims.

Not, by the way, that the predilection for conflict is found only among Evangelical Christians. It is simply the domain in which it is exercised that distinguishes them from some of their Progressive counterparts, not surprising since they both drink deeply of the unchastened imperialism of the United States. Progressives have simply moved the battle to the realm of politics rather than epistemology, and seek a church answerable to political rather than doctrinal purity. 

The primary Christian witness to God’s self-revelation is read through this same confrontational cultural lens. In America, given our cultural predilections, it seems almost self-evident that Bible would be a story of clashing personalities and eventually clashing kingdoms and empires. Even the Prince of Peace will only accomplish his aims in the end by grinding every enemy underfoot. And since that is precisely the process into which Christians imagine the Church was born, then our current world of not only political, but also ecclesial warfare is only to be expected. How can we follow the Prince of Peace unless we too grind our enemies under foot and shake the bloody dust off our shoes before moving on to the next town and the next conflict? 

Purity demands a refiner's fire or a grinding millstone or both, and a Church at war must leave behind the slag and chafe if it is to confront the true enemies of faith. 

It is hardly surprising that the language of Anglo-American Christianity is shot through with military references, given its genesis in real empires. Discipline, a word never used by Christ and never used in the Bible as something one human exercises over another has become key to ecclesiology; which particularly in its Evangelical form is at least as obsessed with authority and order as it is with love and charity. “Onward Christian Soldiers” is a perfect expression of the ethos of a Christian movement which has been at battle since its birth. And if it has become more defensive as its boundaries have shrunk it isn’t for lack of confidence that in the staking of claims it will ultimately prevail. 

But is this the way it must be? Is this a true reading of the Bible, or just a cultural anomaly so apparently self-evident that we can’t imagine another possibility? Is the central Christian witness a report by hardened war correspondents from the frontlines of God’s battle with the powers and principalities of the world - however conceived? 

Is that good news for people whose lives are already saturated with conflict? Is it good news for those already bloodied by daily life in a world at war that the Body of Christ is just another place to lay down your life for a cause, epistemic or political or both? Is this what Jesus preached to a people living under military occupation, at the crossroads of imperial struggle? Is this what he preached to a people both socially and psychologically quite similar to most of us? 

It just isn’t. And the message he passed on to his disciples simply wasn’t a call to a war of defense from or aggression against imagined cultural enemies. 

Jesus was, as gospels declare and portray, a preacher of the good news of God’s Reign. That reign by its nature invites resistance from the powers it displaces. We see this throughout the gospels. Yet Jesus’ answer to that resistance isn’t an aggressive offense or a robust defense. His answer is to continue carrying on his ministry; to let the powers of the world break themselves against the unshakable bulwark of God’s love in action. 

The ministry of the apostles was no different. Not even Paul, ever feisty, shows a predilection for what American Christians promote as "aggressive evangelism". The apostles preach their message and continue to heal, feed, and comfort the marginalized, whose suffering they frequently share. 

So what is the difference between Jesus and his apostles and American Christians?

American Christians, especially those of European descent, have a history of possessing social power. The claims they make are never just about theology. They are about securing their power and influence in the larger society; their privileged place as the makers of America’s moral codes and the laws that enforce them. Their claims are never just about epistemology. They are about the ways in which the dominant epistemology can be deployed in the service of power, whether to defend boundaries or take new intellectual territory. Their claims are never just about justice. They are about the ways in which the concept of justice can be used to gather political power toward enacting some vision of God’s Reign.

And now that we have staked our claims among the powers and principalities of this world, we find ourselves staked to our claims in the arena of their constant battles.  

There is an alternative. Instead of seeing our world, intellectual or social, as a realm in which to aggressively assert our Christian beliefs and insure our Christian power we might consider it as a realm in which God already present in love. We might see it as a realm in which the Good News we enact meets God’s love already in action. We might see it as a realm in which, like Jesus, we find faith already present and waiting. We might even come out from behind our carefully constructed ecclesial walls and go out into that world as the unbounded Church of Jesus Christ.

Not that it will be easy to leave Babylon. And perhaps that is why God has already confused our languages and shredding the fabric of our churches - to make it easier for us to cease being warriors and begin being pilgrims.