Poverty and Salvation (A Response and a Lead-In)

This is in part a response to an astute point made by Matt Duff on one of Bryce’s previous posts, “The Elusive Ecclesiological Jaguar Shark (Church Hunting, pt. 2)” (October 6, 2008), and it is also in part a lead-in to a Church-and-Politics conversation we’ll be starting later on in the week.

Matt raised some valid points on not overemphasizing the importance of caring for the poor as an integral part of the church's mission. I agree that if we flatten the mission of the church to such a degree that all we are is a food bank we forfeit much of the dynamism of what it means to be a spiritual community. (Not to mention we risk failing at trying to do something that food banks are already doing competently.)

Matt, could I press back against your objections just a bit, and try to articulate why I think attentiveness to poverty and suffering is so important? Since this is a complex issue, and one we certainly can't iron out in a single sitting, I’ll limit myself to two points made by one of my favorite theologians, Gustavo Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest regarded as the father of liberation theology, and made a splash in the early 1970s as a theologian trying to make sense of what it meant for the Catholic Church to seek to give its members spiritual nourishment and yet do nothing to resist oppressive Latin American dictatorships that drove Christians into material and spiritual despair. The movement became well known on a popular level in the late 1980s by the film Romero, a true story about a Salvadorian bishop who was assassinated for standing up to his country’s gross violations of human rights. (A superb and convicting film, by the way. I highly recommend it.)

1. "Salvation history is a single history". What Gutiérrez means by this is that there is not a physical, worldly human story and a spiritual, immaterial story, which can be interwoven at times but are essentially distinct. Rather, there is a single story because humans are not merely ghostly souls trapped in material bodies. Human personhood--according to Hebrew thought and increasingly according to recent neuroscience and philosophy of mind--is certainly a multifaceted phenomenon, but not a cleanly bifurcated one. The spiritual is bound up with the material, and vice versa. Jesus came both healing the sick and casting out demons; he came forgiving sins as well as denouncing exploitation by tax collectors. The mission of Christ was to save bodies as well as souls, and in the end we will be raised from the dead in body as well as in spirit. So I suspect that the urge to downplay material nourishment for the sake of more lasting spiritual nourishment might be working from an artificial distinction.

I was in Ghana once with a group of (relatively affluent) American and Ghanaian Christians who went to an abjectly poor village to preach the Gospel. The members of the village had no plumbing or nearby water source, and had to walk a mile to get water from a standing pond that was visibly contaminated. Half of the kids in the village died by the age of five, and half of the kids that did survive had tapeworms. I wanted to ask, Why don't we buy and install a water well for them at the same time that we preach the Gospel? Wouldn't it be better if more children had the sanitation to grow old and have children of their own, so that the church may be larger and more vibrant? Then we could witness to salvation the way Gutiérrez understands it--a salvation that "concerns all men and the whole of man".

I don’t mean to tell that story to unfairly overstate my case. I do think it is important to recognize the integrity of spiritual and material health, however, and if we should be more consistent in Ghana I think we should be more consistent all the way down the line and apply it to our own churches and to how holistically we conceive of salvation.

2. "The center of the world--so-called because the crucified Jesus dwells there, and with him all who suffer unjustly--is the place from which we must proclaim the risen Lord."

Wanting to be in community with the poor shouldn't be some special treatment we give to one group of people at the expense of another. I agree with Matt that we shouldn't assume that the wealthy don't have needs and privilege the poor out of some disingenuous middle-class guilt. It should go without saying that being wealthy does not preclude a person from a need for spiritual nourishment—when I say suffering I mean suffering of all kinds, including despair, addiction and rejection as well as not being able to afford heating in the winter. This should not be about class warfare and it should not be about base materialism. However, the reason we want to be in community with the poor and suffering is because, like Bryce said, it is a gift. We are better off spiritually when we are nearer to hurt and pain, just as Jesus says, "blessed are the poor" and "blessed are those who mourn". We should be suspicious of the health-and-wealth gospels of the likes of Joel Osteen, which mislead people into thinking that following Jesus is about being happy rather than about taking up our cross. Likewise, we should be weary of church membership that only rounds out our already comfortable lives.

Matt rightly said there is no causation between wealth and righteousness, but it seems to me like Jesus is implying there is causation between poverty and righteousness. He even goes as far as saying it is harder for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to enter the eye of a needle. This is obvious hyperbole, to be sure, but the fact that Jesus gives caution to the extremely rich should at least suggest that there is some causal link between material comfort and spiritual complacence.

I realize I’m setting up a tension here that could easily be interpreted as a contradiction--on one hand I'm saying it's good to hurt, on the other I'm saying we should help those who hurt so they don’t hurt anymore. I think we can live into both sides of this tension in a single motion. We should say to those who suffer, “you are blessed”, while at the same time not letting that be an excuse not to offer a helping hand. We should seek to help the hurting, while at the same time not do so in an effort to “fix them” or to narcissistically recreate them in our own image. As hard as it might seem to do this with integrity, I’m convinced it is what we are call to do, and we have Jesus’ life as an example to follow.

Again, thanks for your comments, Matt, and thanks for stimulating and provoking me into thought. You don’t have to apologize for your lengthy comment, since I’ve obviously overindulged in my own, lengthier response. And feel free to respond with profuse and even lengthier disagreement if you like.

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A Concluding Confessional Caveat

I do not purport to be in any fashion an accomplished 'liberation theologian in practice'. As I write this post I become increasingly insecure in articulating this position, as I have few concrete credentials to adjudicate my claim that theology must display a 'preferential option for the poor'. I have, for the most part, enjoyed reading and writing about liberation theology from the comfort of my padded and clean office in small-town America, quite far from the suffering poor of Gutiérrez's Lima or Romero's San Salvador. Do not mistake this position as a kind of attempt to put on airs about authority that I do not in fact have; rather, I build this case from what I understand the Gospel to be that is preached to me and that lays claim to me. So if I have any say left in the matter, I ask that the reader hear me making a confession of what is still before me, mea culpa, mea culpa.

Betting On a Losing Horse (Church Hunting pt. 3)

I’ve always been a fan of George Will. It is probably because my Dad reads George Will and the fact that George Will likes baseball and has written an excellent book about it doesn’t hurt either. While I don’t subscribe to his conservative views, I appreciate his perspective and opinion on the broad range of issues he decides to tackle. I genuinely believe that his voice enriches the debate over nation and politics regardless of what he advocates.

His latest editorial, you can find it here, assess the current state of the Episcopalian denomination. It is a good quick read that rings true on many accounts. The Anglican faith in general is imploding on itself because of a number of issues, but of main import is homosexuality. Funnily enough, my faith journey has led me to the Episcopal Church as the starting point in my church hunt. We will see if it is still around by the time I find a church community.

The problem centers around the question of: With whom may we have fellowship? The Episcopal Church (the U.S. branch of Anglicanism) might have jumped the gun a little early and stated that homosexuals may be ordained and married and have fellowship in the Church. It looks like most of the African Anglicans, and now Pittsburgh have answered the question with a resounding no, they may not have fellowship on those terms. Their answer of no, at least for now, bears the implications that all those who condone the Episcopal Church cannot share in their fellowship either. Church divisions, especially ones as massive a scale as this one should not be treated lightly. Katie and I were troubled by a church we had hoped to attend shamedly and a matter of factly stated on its website, “church splits are a dime a dozen”. Surely we can do better than that.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has managed to change the question from “with whom may we have fellowship”, to “how can we best negotiate our differences and still call ourselves the body of Christ?” Unfortunately, the question is slowly being answered outside of such a context. For to locate our differences with doctrine in a context that places emphasis on unity does not resolve any differences at all. I think that is the point. We must learn to live in the buffer between question and answer, at least in the context of a multinational movement. As a body, we must always seek understanding of those that fall on other sides of issues, we must learn how to befriend and take communion with those who differ from us, not in the hope of changing belief or opinion, but to simply keep talking because the Church, as the approximation of the future Kingdom of God can never ultimately become the Kingdom of God. It is out of our purview and scope, and therefore, the barometer for “with whom may we have fellowship with” must be tuned to the virtues and actions that make us Christians and not who we declare may become Christians. Admittedly, that can only take us so far. And on those issues in which, centuries later, the answer has been resolved slowly, we must take heart in the belief, made famous by the Martin Luther King quote that: “The arc of the moral universe is long, But it bends toward justice”. Of course, if that is all that we’ve got, then we are in a very messy state indeed. But the Church is not a democracy; it cannot be governed by an oppressive majority or a progressive minority. It sometimes feels like, no matter if the denomination is Episcopalian or not, membership in a Church is like picking the wrong horse.


I keep going back and forth with these problems, and I don’t seem to be coming to any viable conclusions or even an agreeable state of mind. Have patience with this current attempt to broach a complicated issue, and keep in mind that I am still thinking and praying about these things.

The Elusive Ecclesiological Jaguar Shark (Church Hunting pt. 2)

So how does the belief that the Church is an always approximation of God’s Kingdom, or at best, a “key actor” in the drama of God’s salvation for the world affect which Church we belong to?

For starters, we can flesh out what God’s Kingdom should be up to, and then observe how well the churches we attend create ways to express God’s Kingdom. For me, God’s Kingdom begins with a great deal of localism and ends with everyday life lived in community. I applaud public works and acts of charity, but I don’t think that it is enough to simply give time and resources to the widows and orphans of our society, simply for the fact that they have very real and awkward, most definitely painful gifts to give to me. The poor do not exist so I can assuage the guilt I feel whenever I squander my paycheck and therefore throw some money their way. They exist because life is not fair. We must learn how to love the poor, to know the poor as something more than an ambiguous “the poor”, we must know the poor as the people on our streets. We must learn how to live with the poor and learn how to break bread together and share the all too private information concerning our salaries and jobs, and therefore indebt ourselves one to another. I don’t think that I participate in God’s Kingdom if I don’t have everyday relations with the poor and oppressed. God’s Kingdom is more about loving the poor instead of hating poverty. So what church embodies such a community with the poor?

We live a few blocks away from the crown jewel of Denver’s park system, Washington Park. It is an absolutely gorgeous and stunning huge sprawl of land in the middle of the city. We have the occasion to walk the park most nights, and we can’t help but feel as if it is the best part of the city. It is not in a gated community, but I can safely say that the area around it has become gentrified. A 1500 square foot bungalow in the area easily goes for $650,000 dollars. As much as I want to live in the serenity, whether real or imagined, of the park, I know that the poor do not live there. The churches in the area do good work, but I get the feeling that they contribute, most decently, to the surrounding community, which happens to be families in need of their pet’s being blessed more than anything. Sure there is struggle and strife within this community, there are terrible lives and sadness, but there seems to me to be an absence of the gift of the poor. The temptation to use the church as a community to round out an already happy life is too great there. As much as I am committed to the prospect that Church must be done within one’s immediate surroundings, this place just doesn’t seem to have all the right pieces to do church.

I am challenged by this. I don’t want to commute to church. I don’t want our church to be something we get to “go into” instead of “be a part of” if that makes any sense. As long as the church is missing the vital community of the poor, I fear that it is destined to quibble about worship style and convenience instead of dealing with the real meat of Christian life lived in community. Perhaps churches should subsidize housing in aim of a quota of impoverished or something like that. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough for the poor around me. Or maybe I’m unwilling to move, commute, or subsidize, but all I know is that I need to live and receive the gifts of the poor as much as they need to live and receive the gifts that I can give. The search continues.

Church Hunting pt. 1

“Church and world are often more prescriptive rather than descriptive terms; in practice, the church is full of the world. This is as it should be; the dialectical drama of sin and salvation implies a dialogical relationship between the church and its others, which include the world and God. Indeed, the Holy Spirit blows where it will, and the activity of the Spirit is not limited to the church. The church is therefore a relational body, and not a closed system. The church is not a polis; ekklesia names something closer to a universal “culture” that is assembled from out of the particular cultures of the world (Healy 2000: 159–75). The church is not only crossed by nonchurch elements; it also contains anti-Christ elements. The church is a corpus permixtum, full of both saints and sinners. As Nicholas Healy reminds us, ecclesiology must maintain both poles of Paul’s dictum in Gal. 6: 14, “far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” On the one hand, we must not boast of the church, as if the church were already the answer to all the world’s social ills; on the other hand, we must glory in Christ, and regard the church as a key actor in the unfolding of the drama of salvation which Christ’s cross has won (Healy 2000: 1–24). The eschatological “not yet” means that the history of the drama so far needs to be told hopefully but penitentially, with room for marginal voices and conflicts. The story is not told in an epic manner, as if the church were made to rule. As the embodiment of God’s politics, the church nevertheless muddles through. God is in charge of all of history. The church’s job is to try to discern in each concrete circumstance how best to embody the politics of the cross in a suffering world” (Cavanaugh “Church” in Blackwell’s Anthology of Political Theology 405).

In Katie and I’s search for a church home, I have kept this passage in mind to help us discern exactly where we should commit our time and resources to. Our search has not been easy, indeed we have to struggle against the temptation of sleeping in and going to the farmer’s market down the street instead of attending churches. I have found that my enthusiasm waxes and wanes in this attempt. When we do decide to go and then we discover how a place doesn’t feel right, or a theology is a little too out of whack for our liking, it seems to set the search back for a week or so. In this post I want to unpack this Cavanaugh passage and help shed some light on just what we are looking for.

I am fascinated and convicted by the thought that the church does not have a monopoly on the workings of the Holy Spirit. I don’t take this idea to necessarily mean The Holy Spirit, but a more general idea of God’s exertion of grace upon our world. I have been guilty of thinking that the Church is the super-structure end all of all ends for the World’s ills before, but I think that ultimately leads to an impoverished community of believers. I still believe that, I think, but the idea needs to be prefaced with the very important “not yet”. As Christians we must struggle with the knowledge that we are paradoxically already transformed into the new creation, while at the same time we are the broken and hapless community in need of much grace and patience. If we are indeed not so hapless, I would think that this whole eschatologic moment would have come a lot sooner. So if the church must negotiate with other voices, and perhaps even contain voices that can carry the whispers of God’s grace in our world, what does that look like? Surely there must be a very bare-bones sub-set of beliefs that one must in some way subscribe to in order to bear the witness of Christian. I don’t like muddled pluralism, but I don’t like rigid sects either. Can the church contain anti-Christ elements? Does the church incorporate the Truth’s of God’s grace outside of it in the same manner as the plundering of Egypt’s riches? Or perhaps the idea that the church is made of the world is very important here. Perhaps subscribing to Christianity is a continual act that can never stick for good. Perhaps there is so much of the world in those who profess the witness of the Church that our subscriptions and memberships are never enough to fully separate ourselves from even the world inside of us. If I interpret that passage as something to be applied personally and inter-church, it can certainly work, although it does sound as if the hope the Church has to offer the world is very muddled indeed.


This reminds me of the idea of Carnival. The saints are always sinners of a sort, and the sinners are always saints of a sort, and in the Carnival revelry, we are exposed as the “already-but-not-yet” hope of for the World. Although we are exposed as the corpus permixtum that we are, our hope is also reified by the act of switching places. When the Kings are made into fools, and the fools into Kings, when the Sinners are made into saints and the saints into sinners, we are reminded, by the sinners who play saints, that we are actually saints of a sort, and we must bear witness as best we can.

The Way, The Truth, and The Etc. Etc.

Last Wednesday, I visited the local Church of Christ in Sidney, Nebraska. I was out on business, and well, what else is there to do besides play shuffleboard in the local bar? Don’t get me wrong, I love shuffleboard, but had already frequented the “Silver Dollar” the previous night. It was a medium size building, which gave me hope that I could probably make some connections through the ACU network. When I walked into the auditorium, I was greeted by no less than fifteen to seventeen people filling up one aisle of the church. I knew I was taking a risk by attending, and viewing the sparse faces in the crowd confirmed that I had lost my bet with fate, and could not simply pop in and maintain a relative sense of anonymity. After much explaining and easing of fears as to why a young person would grace their assembly, I was soon welcomed into the small life of the church. They wanted me to lead singing, and while, I love to sing the old songs, I have never been graced with a confidence of pitch to actually lead worship. Where’s Daniel Wheeler when you need him?
The irony of the situation is that I have great confidence in my speaking/preaching ability, but judging from the lesson of that night, I could in no good faith offer up words of exhortation, exegesis, or worship that would gel with the firm convictions in Biblical authority and inerrancy, not to mention a wonderful assurance that interpretation of the Bible is straightforward and is not mediated by any whims of culture, intelligence, or history that the Church holds. This realization made me feel like a voyeur, or a PhD candidate in rhetoric studying the “heuristics” of a small time denomination in a small town. I felt more a sense of the sovereignty of the community than a sense of an impoverished theology bent solely on getting to Heaven. Which in turn, made me feel like the typical liberal, forever tolerant and a respecter of persons. To their delight, I told them that I would return next Wednesday night, which I am still planning to do, barring a hankering for shuffleboard. I didn’t want to change them, or explore ways in which, as a community they could broaden their definition of fellowship to include more people than showed up that night. For starters, it is not my community. I don’t feel like it is appropriate to engage in theological discourse where there is a lack of accountability between individuals and communities. To do so would be to come across as foolish as the swindlers (the Prince and Dauphine?) in Huckleberry Finn when they put on mock spiritual revivals. The members of the Church eke out an existence from the ground or at the Cabella’s outdoor headquarters. They solidify their community, not by what they believe, but by simply making the time to show up and be with each other. And although I tell their story in a light that makes Grace abound to all of our foolish human searching, (which reifies my own positions), I do not tell their story in a manner that trivializes what they do when they show up. I do not know where the boundaries of the Church end and begin. I withhold my judgment, at least to their faces, on their quite virulent theology. It just doesn’t seem to be my place to discourse with them.

I tell this story to confess how much our community means to me. Perhaps we are like minded, perhaps we are monolithic in our theology, but I don’t think so. We have diversity, and more importantly, accountability that allows us to engage in discourse. We should never take this for granted, because community is a hard thing to form. I hope we grow together in faith and good works, whatever that means. I hope we build communities with those we see face to face on a regular basis. I hope we are transformed, and I hope we figure this whole thing out, at least for the time being. I’ve started a sermon I want to present the preacher of the Church of Christ in Sidney. When I finish, I’ll post it up here.
Bryce