It’s four days before Christmas, and I’m sensing again my annual discomfort with “gentle Mary” beside the manger. I have a confession: I don’t like that Mary very much. I don't like her ephemerality, her not-quite-human glow, her immaculate presence out of place in a barn. She's not real, but a porcelain send-up of a person.
It wasn’t until I reread a passage in Jürgen Moltmann’s The Way of Jesus Christ, that it finally dawned on me that it was possible to see Mary another way. To explain, I need to spend unpack a little of Moltmann’s Christology, so bear with me.
Moltmann seeks to develop a “pneumatological Christology” – a way of understanding Jesus
that does not begin with Jesus himself. It begins with the ruach/the Holy Spirit. It is the coming of the Spirit, the creative breath of God: in this Jesus comes forward as ‘the anointed one’ (masiah, christos), proclaims the gospel of the kingdom with power, and convinces many with the signs of the new creation.[2]
The core of Moltmann’s theology is his emphasis on the fact that the Risen One of Easter is none other than the One crucified. For Moltmann, the resurrection is the eschatological moment, the moment in which it is clear that, in Christ, God’s promised future has broken through and is present in history. The new creation has begun. But Moltmann is clear that this eschatological moment reveals the nature and character of the whole of Jesus’ life, and is not merely a divine “stamp of approval” placed like a period at the end of a sentence.
The eschatological moment of his raising from the dead must therefore also be understood as God’s eternal moment. So the raising did not merely happen synchronically to the dead Jesus; it also happened diachronically to the whole Jesus in all the moments and aspects of his life and proclamation. That is why he is present in the power of the Spirit, not mere in his last moment on the cross but in all his moments from birth onwards. He is raised and present in the Spirit, not only as the one crucified, but also as the one baptized, as the healer, the preacher on the mount, the friend of sinners and tax-collectors, and the one whom the women accompanied to the moment of his death.[3]
If I understand him, Moltmann is arguing that Jesus does not grow up an average boy and become a normal man who then, by the power of God’s Spirit, is at some point transformed into the Christ, to live thereafter as the Messiah. Rather, he is arguing that the “eternal moment” of the resurrection transforms Jesus not merely in the tomb but in all the moments of his life, so that in every moment, by the power of the Spirit, the risen Christ is already present.
Moltmann suggests that the One in the manger is not merely “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” but the Risen Christ. The one whom “shepherds guard and angels sing” is not merely a defenseless baby, but the Christ raised from death and strong to save. Indeed, as the old spiritual goes on to claim, “we didn’t know who you was.” Not the one who will be, but rather the one who was and is already the Risen One, the Christ of God.
Now for the passage that has made me rethink Mary. In his section on “Christ’s Birth in the Spirit from a Theological Perspective,” Moltmann says:
If the Christ is to be called the Son of God, then to be consistent we have to talk about the Spirit as his divine “mother.” He therefore comes into the world from the Father and from the Spirit, and with his coming God’s Spirit takes up its indwelling in the world, first of all in the messianic Son, through his birth – then in the fellowship of the children of God through their rebirth (John 3:6; I Peter 1:3, 23) – then through the rebirth of the whole cosmos (Matt. 19:28). The birth of the messianic Son of God through the Spirit is the beginning and the sign of hope for the rebirth of human beings and the cosmos through God’s Shekinah.[4]
To put it another way, Moltmann removes Mary as the central character in the manger scene, and in her place casts the Spirit.
For me, there are two valuable learnings here. First, Moltmann helps me straighten out what we mean by the virgin birth. For too much of Christian piety, the focus is on Mary’s virginity. Holding high the miraculous nature of Jesus’ birth is a way of reassuring ourselves that Jesus is, in fact, the Messiah. If we can’t explain it, it must be God. But Moltmann’s point is that the birthing of the Spirit, not the virgin birth, is the sign of Jesus’ divinity. He reminds us that, for the early Church, the emphasis was not on the “virginity” but on the “birth” – as a way of proclaiming that Jesus was no less human and real than the rest of our woman-born race. The assurance of Jesus’ divinity, his essential identity with God, is a function of the Spirit in God’s eternal moment of the resurrection, the moment that transforms all other moments, before and since.
Second, Moltmann helps the Protestant in me know what to do with Mary. All the pious devotion to her as the “mother of God” seems to direct attention away from the Risen One in the manger and onto a woman who is neither Risen nor the One. But Moltmann reclaims for Mary her proper place in the story:
If we take the birth of Christ from the Spirit seriously, then much of what the Church has ascribed to “the virgin Mary” is transposed to God the Holy Spirit himself, and Mary can once again be what she was and is: the Jewish mother of Jesus. Mary is a witness, and … she also embodies the indwelling of the life-giving Spirit. … If in the history of Christ Mary has this ministering function, a function that points away from herself, then and then especially she will arrive at her full significance in the history of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.[5]
I love that Mary. I love her because she is not rarefied and immaculate, set apart from the gritty reality of life and aglow with the aura of divinity. She is a woman, like the women of faith that I know, who with the witness of their daily labors of faith and practice give birth to a Church that is itself the witness to Christ. She bleeds, she loves, she hopes and fears. She might even curse the pain of childbirth; surely she curses the poverty and pointlessness that curses all the children she bears. I love her because I love the Church, and that’s what the Church I love is supposed to do.
______________
[1] With apologies to Marcus Borg.
[2] J. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993, p. 73)
[3] Moltman, The Way of Jesus Christ, p. 76.
[4] Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, p.86.
[5] Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, p.86.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
"Debts" and "Debt": Reflections on Tiger Woods, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Lord's Prayer
I admit it; I am out of accord with Scripture, the Confessions, and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church.
When I say the Lord’s Prayer, and when I come to the fifth petition (“forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”), I always say, “forgive us our debt….”[1] I admit that the Greek text of Mt 6:12 (ta opheilemata) is clearly plural – “debts” – and that the Heidelberg Cathechism and both Westminster Catechisms explicitly translate the Greek in the plural. I further acknowledge that the General Assembly is on record (somewhere in the early 20th century, I think, although I can’t find the reference) affirming this translation as correct (in distinction from “trespasses” and “trespass against us”). So why do I insist on singularity in the face of all this support for plurality?
Blame it on Reinhold Niebuhr.
In a recent edition of Christian Century, Andrew Finstuen has a fine short article about Niebuhr, and how the great twentieth-century American theologian and ethicist might comment on the “American mess” we find ourselves in here at the close of the first decade of the twenty-first.
Finstuen observes:
Niebuhr argues that Americans overestimated the virtues of democracy and free market capitalism. On the rare occasions when Americans repented of their misdeeds, they did so by focusing of sins rather than the condition of sin inherent in them. Niebuhr spent a career warning of the dangers of this attitude and its destructive consequences. The disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the economic crisis are, from a Niebuhrian perspective, the terrible yet predictable outcomes of a nation unwilling to regard itself as a sinner.[2]
As I write these words, the news media are full of stories about Tiger Woods’s putative misadventures with various women to whom he is not married. The journalistic “tsk-tsking” over Woods’s apparent failure to remain faithful to his marriage has superseded both the health care debate and the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. I find it fascinating that we are ready to tread the moral high road when it comes to the peccadilloes of our sports heroes, but don’t see the moral issues implicit in undeclared wars and uninsured people.
In truth, though, my point is not to take a side on the question of the political or moral legitimacy of our nation’s present war efforts. Neither am I interested in sacrificing athletes on the altar of public sensibility. My point is theological: we have a tendency to think of “sins” rather than of “sin” – of particular misdeeds rather than of the underlying alienation from God that gives rise to those misdeeds. Thinking this way leads us to believe that if we but reform the problematic areas of our conduct – restrain our tendencies toward overindulgence, refrain from inappropriate sexual behavior, clean up our language – that we can legitimately lay claim to being a righteous people living in a righteous nation whose actions on the global stage are, logically, righteous.
Niebuhr argues that such an equation – “sin” equals “misdeeds” – forgets the Biblical story of Eden. It forgets that the fundamental problem of original sin was not the act but the attitude: not Eve’s taking a bite of the apple, but the human impulse to self-protection and mistrust of God that prompted her to take the bite. Sin is a response to the basic anxiety posed by the possibility that things might not be as good as God promised. In response to that anxiety, we choose not to trust God but to claim power that is not ours in an effort to ensure that we get our way. Sin, Niebuhr argued, is not the things we do or don’t do; it is mistrust of God in the face of the anxiety of existence. Sin underlies all human reality, and we cannot change it by dint of our own efforts.
Niebuhr reminds us that we are not righteous simply because we clean up our act. Righteousness does not come from amending our various personal misbehaviors or remedying our manifold social ills. Neither putting more troops in Afghanistan nor withdrawing our troops from it, neither creating a “public option” for health insurance nor trusting capitalist principles to improve medical delivery, neither refraining from extramarital affairs nor being drug-free nor eating less red meat will make us righteous. Each may contribute in its own way to a better life for some or all. But in the end, righteousness is not earned. It’s a gift. You don’t earn a gift; you receive it from a free and sovereign Giver.
It’s Advent, the season in which we reflect on the gift of Jesus Christ into the world of first-century Judaism and the coming of God’s transformation of the world as a whole. The amazing good news of Advent is that Christ comes to work God’s transformation on the world quite apart from whether we behave ourselves or not. Christ dies on the cross not merely to deliver us from our particular and personal failures, but to demonstrate that there are no dread depths of human depravity into which God’s redemptive grace cannot reach. Christ rises from the tomb to overcome the basic condition of sin that ensnares us all, both individually and as churches and nations. Christ “reigns in power for us” as the ongoing assurance that we do not hope in vain, that things-as-they-are will not be things-as-God-will-have-them. Believing anything less sells the gospel short.
So this Advent, when I join my voice with others of the faithful in the prayer that Jesus taught, I will say “debt” rather than “debts.” I suppose it is my small Niebuhrian protest against a concept of sin that is too small to be true, and a hope for forgiveness that is too weak to meet the need. It’s not that there aren’t particular failures or misdeeds for which I need forgiveness; there are those aplenty. It’s rather that sin is more systemic, more pervasive, more abounding than that. Fortunately, the promise of Advent is that the more sin abounds, the more abounds God’s amazing grace.
May God bless you this Advent, and in all the days to come.
[1] I make a similar change to the third paragraph of the Apostles’ Creed: “the forgiveness of sin…” rather than “sins.”
[2] Andrew Finstuen, “This American Mess,” Christian Century, December 1, 2009. P. 11
When I say the Lord’s Prayer, and when I come to the fifth petition (“forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”), I always say, “forgive us our debt….”[1] I admit that the Greek text of Mt 6:12 (ta opheilemata) is clearly plural – “debts” – and that the Heidelberg Cathechism and both Westminster Catechisms explicitly translate the Greek in the plural. I further acknowledge that the General Assembly is on record (somewhere in the early 20th century, I think, although I can’t find the reference) affirming this translation as correct (in distinction from “trespasses” and “trespass against us”). So why do I insist on singularity in the face of all this support for plurality?
Blame it on Reinhold Niebuhr.
In a recent edition of Christian Century, Andrew Finstuen has a fine short article about Niebuhr, and how the great twentieth-century American theologian and ethicist might comment on the “American mess” we find ourselves in here at the close of the first decade of the twenty-first.
Finstuen observes:
Niebuhr argues that Americans overestimated the virtues of democracy and free market capitalism. On the rare occasions when Americans repented of their misdeeds, they did so by focusing of sins rather than the condition of sin inherent in them. Niebuhr spent a career warning of the dangers of this attitude and its destructive consequences. The disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the economic crisis are, from a Niebuhrian perspective, the terrible yet predictable outcomes of a nation unwilling to regard itself as a sinner.[2]
As I write these words, the news media are full of stories about Tiger Woods’s putative misadventures with various women to whom he is not married. The journalistic “tsk-tsking” over Woods’s apparent failure to remain faithful to his marriage has superseded both the health care debate and the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. I find it fascinating that we are ready to tread the moral high road when it comes to the peccadilloes of our sports heroes, but don’t see the moral issues implicit in undeclared wars and uninsured people.
In truth, though, my point is not to take a side on the question of the political or moral legitimacy of our nation’s present war efforts. Neither am I interested in sacrificing athletes on the altar of public sensibility. My point is theological: we have a tendency to think of “sins” rather than of “sin” – of particular misdeeds rather than of the underlying alienation from God that gives rise to those misdeeds. Thinking this way leads us to believe that if we but reform the problematic areas of our conduct – restrain our tendencies toward overindulgence, refrain from inappropriate sexual behavior, clean up our language – that we can legitimately lay claim to being a righteous people living in a righteous nation whose actions on the global stage are, logically, righteous.
Niebuhr argues that such an equation – “sin” equals “misdeeds” – forgets the Biblical story of Eden. It forgets that the fundamental problem of original sin was not the act but the attitude: not Eve’s taking a bite of the apple, but the human impulse to self-protection and mistrust of God that prompted her to take the bite. Sin is a response to the basic anxiety posed by the possibility that things might not be as good as God promised. In response to that anxiety, we choose not to trust God but to claim power that is not ours in an effort to ensure that we get our way. Sin, Niebuhr argued, is not the things we do or don’t do; it is mistrust of God in the face of the anxiety of existence. Sin underlies all human reality, and we cannot change it by dint of our own efforts.
Niebuhr reminds us that we are not righteous simply because we clean up our act. Righteousness does not come from amending our various personal misbehaviors or remedying our manifold social ills. Neither putting more troops in Afghanistan nor withdrawing our troops from it, neither creating a “public option” for health insurance nor trusting capitalist principles to improve medical delivery, neither refraining from extramarital affairs nor being drug-free nor eating less red meat will make us righteous. Each may contribute in its own way to a better life for some or all. But in the end, righteousness is not earned. It’s a gift. You don’t earn a gift; you receive it from a free and sovereign Giver.
It’s Advent, the season in which we reflect on the gift of Jesus Christ into the world of first-century Judaism and the coming of God’s transformation of the world as a whole. The amazing good news of Advent is that Christ comes to work God’s transformation on the world quite apart from whether we behave ourselves or not. Christ dies on the cross not merely to deliver us from our particular and personal failures, but to demonstrate that there are no dread depths of human depravity into which God’s redemptive grace cannot reach. Christ rises from the tomb to overcome the basic condition of sin that ensnares us all, both individually and as churches and nations. Christ “reigns in power for us” as the ongoing assurance that we do not hope in vain, that things-as-they-are will not be things-as-God-will-have-them. Believing anything less sells the gospel short.
So this Advent, when I join my voice with others of the faithful in the prayer that Jesus taught, I will say “debt” rather than “debts.” I suppose it is my small Niebuhrian protest against a concept of sin that is too small to be true, and a hope for forgiveness that is too weak to meet the need. It’s not that there aren’t particular failures or misdeeds for which I need forgiveness; there are those aplenty. It’s rather that sin is more systemic, more pervasive, more abounding than that. Fortunately, the promise of Advent is that the more sin abounds, the more abounds God’s amazing grace.
May God bless you this Advent, and in all the days to come.
[1] I make a similar change to the third paragraph of the Apostles’ Creed: “the forgiveness of sin…” rather than “sins.”
[2] Andrew Finstuen, “This American Mess,” Christian Century, December 1, 2009. P. 11
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