Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Corporatism, Commonweal, and Just Society - Lazar Puhalo

INTENT AND CONCEPT

Since we are going to be discussing corporatism and commonweal in various contexts, we should say something about these two concepts. Corporatism is a basic principle of fascism. It seeks to curtail individualism, not in the context of commonweal – the common good – but in the sense of top-down control and order in society. It seeks to organise society into a hierarchy of corporate [not to be confused with capitalist corporations] structures that require conformity, severely limiting or even curtailing altogether individualistic liberties and actions.

This structured hierarchy corporatises behavioural norms according to a given ideology. Every aspect of society can be corporatised in order to produce a culture conforming to a given ideology. Education, religion, morality, and every external form of behaviour must be regulated in order to impose this ideological concept in a matrix interpretation of the "norm." This corporate structure is imposed and enforced by an arbitrary system of law.

Such a system falls under a general ideology known as “fascism.” It can be a secular civil construct or a heavily moralistic religious arbitrary “theocratic” construct.

There are other understandings and levels of corporatism, but we are using the ideological concept outlined above, which is the general form used to create a fascist society, usually with a deformed and corrupted variation of crony capitalism which curtails individualism and individual creativity of a new form which might interfere with the centrally controlled structure of social order and economic structures.

While Canada was originally shaped with the "Red Tory" idea of commonweal as opposed to a radical, self-centred individualism, commonweal is understood as "the common good expressed within a political system of democracy and individual liberties." In this system, capitalism is regulated only to the degree that is necessary for stability, justice, and fairness. Civil society is also regulated as little as possible while ensuring such things as equal healthcare for everyone and a regulated social safety net that provides for the commonweal, the common good, for the whole of society without impinging upon civil liberties but ensuring the greatest scope of civil liberties that are permitted in a peaceful and cohesive society. This presupposes freedom in such realms as religion and reasonable concepts of morality, a variety of political parties within a cohesive and democratic nationhood. The operational ideology in such a society is "democracy and the greatest scope of civil liberties as can be afforded in a united and orderly culture." In Canada, this is well expressed in The Canadian Charter. We will be mainly interested in discussing the idolatry of corporatising religion and morality, the idolatry and blasphemy of an ideological, arbitrary authoritarian “theocracy.”

Within these concepts, there are variations, of course, but these are the concept within which we are writing. Having established this framework, let us continue.

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Noetic Knowing, Mystical Union & Common Grace - Ron Dart

Abp Lazar Puhalo - Social & Economic Trinity, Essence & Energies

Supplement by Abp. Lazar

Perhaps at the root of the problem is a misunderstanding about ekonomia.

The concept is that when "akrivia" [the strict application of a canon or doctrine] might actually hinder someone's salvation–or even emotional and mental health– we apply economy, which is really the opposite of akrivia [strictness].

Allowing remarriage after a divorce is a clear example, and is especially necessary for young people who are not able to tightly control their sex drive.

Another example is when we receive people and to the Orthodox Church through chrismation if they have been baptized in a trinitarian church. Reception by chrismation does not become the "principle" but rather is an exercise in economy. The Chrismation would be seen as a form of ordination into the Royal priesthood. We do not thereby declare that the baptism was complete, but we exercise economy for the sake of someone's salvation.

I am not clear about what some people are trying to make of ekonomia.

The economy of our Saviour is really this: we could not on our own recover paradise, in the alienation between man and God, so strictness was set aside, and Christ, in himself, abolished the alienation. Men could not rise up to heaven, so Heaven descended to men.

I don't know what convoluted twist some people are trying to make of this. Our Christian social programme should be the Beatitudes and the moral imperatives given by Jesus Christ.

We are far off the track when we understand "justice" in a juridical sense and do not understand it as "balancing matters," restoring the balance in nature and the balance in the relationship between God and Man.

Ekonomia simply means "relinquishing strictness in order to facilitate salvation."

We also have to extend that to matters where strictness would mentally and emotionally damage a person. That has to be the only real definition of "social economy." Ekonomia can only be understood in the context of soteriology.

Francis Bacon's Five Holy Wars - Ron Dart

Ron Dart explores Francis Bacon's "An Advertisement Touching a Holy War" (edited with commentary by Laurence Lampert)

"Out the Embers" - OTC conversation (Jersak, Young, Fee, Murrell, MacMurray)

The Rich Man & Lazarus: Getting the Main Point - Fr Jonathan Tobias

Parables are stories

The Parables of our Lord are the most beautiful and meaningful talks in history. They are matchless in their depth. While the great third-century theologian Origen and the fourteenth-century poet Dante said that there were four levels of interpretation, G K Chesterton (the English Roman Catholic essayist from a century ago) said that he could count, in the Lord’s Parables, at least seven levels of meaning.

There’s no doubt about that.

Still, the Parables are simple and immediate. They “come at you” with personality, with familiar experiences, and concrete images. In style and approach, these are not like St Paul’s epistles, which are filled with doctrinal and propositional presentations. 

No, parables are meant to be experienced as stories, first and foremost. While one is meant to take St Paul’s epistles, and the Lord’s addresses (like the Sermon on the Mount), with every sentence as a proposition, the parables are different.

No matter how deep they are, the Parables of the Lord are always fresh, ever new. 

With parables, one has to look for the moral of the story, which usually comes at the very end. Then, one reads that moral back into the story, and the whole thing opens up in depth and clarity.

This is important. It should be easy to tell the difference between a parable and a doctrinal exposition, because the simple experience of the two is sharply different. An exposition proceeds by logical argument, point by point.

But a parable proceeds by the building up of drama in the narrative. The listener or reader is meant to be “hooked in,” his attention focused on the characters and the chain of events. And then the crisis of the story and the climax, and the conclusion where everything is made clear.

The main point

I propose to read with you the great Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. We will try to pay attention to the story, and to look for the “main point,” the moral of the parable. What was the Lord’s main intent in telling this story? What does the whole parable say, the whole narrative? What is the main concern of this Scripture?

These questions differ from the unfortunately common attempt to construct a dogma about the afterlife out of details from the story. I understand that a number of writers in Holy Tradition have made inferences from this parable, and they have taken from the story a number of eschatological propositions. 

Some writers in Holy Tradition have taken from this parable some difficult, if not unfeasible, eschatological interpretations: they teach that the angels take up the souls of the righteous to the “bosom of Abraham” … that the souls of the unrighteous are sent to torment in the fires of Hades … that there is an uncrossable chasm between the bosom of Abraham and Hades.

In general, such writers like to see this parable as referring to the “intermediate state of the soul” – that is, the bodiless existence of the soul in the interval between physical death and the general resurrection at the Last Day.

Such an interpretation is a difficult case to make. For one thing, it is attempting to force out a  literalistic reading of a parable, which is a perilous thing. But at the same time, these same writers interpret “the bosom of Abraham” in this parable as symbolically referring to the intermediate state of the soul in fellowship with Christ. So already, the strict “literalistic” interpretation is left behind.

But also, it is plain, for any reasonable eye to see, and any open heart, that parables must be taken in a literary sense, not literalistically. Stories are full of symbol and metaphor. They rely on rhetorical tropes like overstatement (hyperbole) and understatement (litotes). Everyone knows that in Aesop’s Fable, the fox moaning over sour grapes is not mainly about a fox denouncing grapes simply because he couldn’t get at them, but about an all-too-human and all-too-common defect. 

Everyone knows that Jesus really did not expect someone to literally pluck out his eye because it offended them.

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Media Apartheid - From Ukraine to Iran to Palestine to Qatar - Ron Dart

The media has legitimately focused on the plight of women in the theocratic state of Iran and the aggressive nature of Russia in the tragic Russian-Ukrainian War over the last few months.

I was on staff with Amnesty International in the 1980s (before I was hired at Fraser Valley College) and was the point person for a variety of states in the Middle East that were known as violators (in various ways and means) of elementary and fundamental human rights.

I had previously worked on a PhD thesis on Martin Buber and the political implications of his classic philosophic book I and Thou and its political implications for Jews in Germany and Palestine-Israel from the 1920-1960s. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have stated in recent publications, in an unequivocal way, that Israel now constitutes an “Apartheid State.”

We do know that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney eventually convinced President Ronald Reagan that South Africa was an apartheid state, and the acted on it. The West acted decisively on the apartheid nature of South Africa; why not Israel?

I recently received an email from Israel from a student who graduated from UFV in the Adult Education program more than a decade ago. He was on his 3^rd trip to Israel and spent time in Nablus in Balata Refugee Camp—such a sad and painful place to see and, for those who live there, where apartheid is most obvious. Those who have visited and lingered long in Palestinian refugee camps cannot but sense the suffering of decades.

This past Spring season, one of our finest POLSC students finished his M.A. and Ph.D. at Exeter University (probably at the higher end of Middle Eastern Studies in the UK).

Colter Louwerse worked closely with Ilya Pappe—at the forefront of Jewish revisionist thinking on the demolition of multiple Palestinian villages that brought into being Israel in 1948. Much of Colter’s work was on the UN, Israel, and the Palestinians—he is now doing more work on Canada, Israel, and the Palestinians.

It is somewhat significant that it has been historic Tories in Canada (see Heath Macquarrie’s Red Tory Blues and “The Stanfield Report”) that have questioned the structural nature of Israeli politics in regard to the Palestinians and the living conditions of many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, refugee camps in nearby Muslim states, and the illegal proliferation of Jewish settlements.

Our present Prime Minister, in principle and rhetoric, often claims to be a human rights defender. But he does or says little to oppose the state of Israel, and when minimally inching in such a direction, the language of antisemitism is employed as a rhetorical way of silencing critical questions. It is important to note that Trudeau’s major fundraiser is from the wealthy pro-Israeli Bronfman family.               

We might ask why Iran and Ukraine receive so much attention while the ongoing structural injustices in Israel go consistently ignored (except, of course, when there is a momentary violent flare-up). The deeper reasons for such violence often ignore the immense disparity between how many Jews and Palestinians live. The historic underlying causes are often ignored by the media as they tend to focus on the immediacy of symptoms.  

Likewise, the death of the Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, by the “morality police” must be protested (and the way women have been treated in Iran). It is noteworthy, though, that the West conveniently ignored human rights violations when the Shah (who the West supported) was in power in Iran.

The West backed another human rights violator (Hussein in Iraq) to oppose the Iranian theocracy until Hussein foolishly attacked Kuwait in 1990. But, the attention given to Amini misses the fact that a significant Palestinian journalist (Shireen Abu Akleh) was killed in May in the West Bank while covering Israeli violence in the city of Jenin. Amini is a martyr of sorts, and her cause has been given ample media coverage, but we hear relatively little about the death of Shireen Abu Akleh.

There is, in short, not only the way the structural politics of apartheid play out in Israel but also the way western media panders to some martyrs and ignores others. Is this not yet another form of apartheid?

It is somewhat noticeable at the 2022 FIFA World Cup that although some issues of human rights have been raised, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is predictably absent. Media apartheid works at many levels, where the sacrificial lambs are often  Palestinians in the West and, to the East, their Sunni brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  

Dr. Colter Louwerse will be giving a lecture Tuesday November 29 (4:00-5:30: A225 Abbotsford Campus) on “The Struggle for Palestinian Rights at the United Nations.”

Ron Dart
POLSC

My Journey "Out of the Embers" - Nicky Martini

Bradley Jersak's Out of the Embers caught me by surprise. I thought my time to look back was done. At the beginning of this year, over a whole month, I experienced a creative miracle where, by the end, I knew God had healed my PTSD. Within the pages of Bradley's book, I can feel more waves of release and healing. 

 

From the “Prodigal Test” 

 

“God gives us the dignity of finding our own bottom. Once that happens, we might truly come home in a way that the elder brother apparently never did.”

 

It’s taken me days to get through the sections on Nietzsche and Simone Weil. Within those pages, I revisited the worst days of my deconstruction, primarily the grief that had consumed me. 

 

I never said “God is dead” but some nine years ago, the second part of my deconstruction came as what I can only call a wrecking ball. I remember the moment it happened. I was in church, mic in hand, about to blissfully share some grace encouragement. And before I could get a word out, God popped my bubble. It was like I had rose-coloured glasses on... and then I didn’t. All I could see were faces in the pews who were not interested in my wonderful grace words. They were suffering silently in a place where suffering was not allowed, or at least not talked about. Ours was a toxic positivity church of happy grace clappers, and I was one of them. I put the mic down, grabbed my husband and my children, and ran like a madwoman. I never went back.

 

Immediately after, my mum was diagnosed with cancer. She was in Greece with my dad and my brother, so the family flew her and my dad back to Australia. 

 

She survived another six weeks. I prayed for more time with her; I prayed for her healing, and when it became evident that that was not going to happen, I prayed that I would be there with her when she took her last breath. I lay on the floor next to her bed so as to be with her. It was important to me because we hadn’t had a great relationship when I was growing up. I was a terrible teenager. But for years, I had longed to live close to her and to have the opportunity to love on her as she deserved. To make up for lost years. 

 

The moment my mumma took her last breath, she was surrounded by her whole family. Except me. I was on the toilet. 

 

My faith at that moment collapsed. The wrecking ball hit with no mercy. Didn’t we learn in church that "all God’s promises were yes and amen" and that He gives us the desires of our hearts? Not only did God no answer the desire of my heart that I had hoped and prayed for over many years, but He took Mum home while I was on the toilet, shitting. It was like He had taken a knife, jabbed me in my heart, and twisted it to drive it home. I wasn’t angry with God; I was deeply hurt. I felt like the only One who I could trust had hurt me in the worst possible way. I can’t describe the pain in my heart. 

 

One morning after her funeral, I got in my car to go to work, and I said out loud, “God, you and I are done. Don’t talk to me anymore. I won’t be looking to hear from you or to feel you. I won’t be in any relationship with you. I won’t be loving you and certainly won’t be waiting to receive any love from you. You can leave me alone now.”

 

I said it and I meant it. I would repeat this many, many times over the next two years when I was alone. For the first time in my whole life, I stopped talking to God. I didn’t question his existence. I knew He was real and I knew He was with me all the time. But I chose deliberately not to be in relationship with Him. 

 

Still, my mumma’s death was not my rock bottom. It happened over the two years of ripping my heart out day after day. It was the numbing myself and not allowing myself to love and be loved by the God who had once swept me off my feet.

 

My rock bottom came when I had so shut myself off from God out of deep hurt that I could no longer feel Him. I don’t know how to describe living without God except to say I felt dead. I starved myself to death. I went about my days mechanically. No joy; just deep, deep sadness and inconsolable grief for my loss. I cut myself off from whatever few friends I had left because I somehow felt like my darkness would contaminate them, plus there was no room in my despair. 

 

Two years passed. My hubby Brett and I were driving a long distance and he had his music playing on random. What used to be my all-time favourite God song came on: Lifehouse's “Everything.”

 

Find me here and speak to me
I want to feel you, I need to hear you

 

I started to cry and Brett asked what was wrong. I told him that the hardest thing for me, doing this life without God, has been that I’m no longer moved by Him. Every time I used to hear this song, it was like every cell in my body would be caught up into some ecstatic place of joy indescribable but now I am not moved by Him anymore. Brett laughed and said, "Well, that’s an easy fix! You just have to let Him." 

 

And so I prayed, “Lord I miss you, I still feel hurt by you, but Lord, if you never answer a single prayer of mine it doesn’t matter. If I see no miracles but only pain and suffering in this world, nevertheless, I don’t want to do it on my own anymore. There’s no life for me apart from you. I need you, and I want to be moved by you again." And so He did. Once again, I fixed my eyes on the Lover of my soul for no other reason than to be loved and to love.

 

Reading Embers today, specifically Simone Weil's words about coming home, God reminded me of a recurring nightmare I used to have after my mum had passed. In the dream, my mum and I were lost and both of us trying to find our way home. Somewhere in the dream, I would lose her and desperately try to find her so we could find home together. The dream would always end before I found her and before we found home. 

 

Today, God spoke to me about how my mumma suffered from terrible grief in her life, something she never got over. Both my sister and I would say we don’t ever want to be like her, always grieving. For my sister, it stopped her from being able to grieve. And for me, I seemed to grieve immensely. I felt God saying, “Your mumma is home now with me and she no longer grieves. And you know I am always with you, and I am healing this grief." 

 

I think I read somewhere that Out of the Embers is like the healing balm of Gilead. Indeed it is.
I know it will bring much healing to many. 

Universal and Anti-universal Notes - Fr Jonathan Tobias

In the ongoing, too often overheated, discussion of Christian universalism, here are some notes that might be helpful, especially in avoiding unnecessary runs down the garden path.

1. Universalism does not discount the possibility of hell -- just its co-eternity with God. Any such experience is not retributive, but purgative, therapeutic & educational.
   
   
2. Hell, or purgation, is not inflicted, but arises from the attempt of the self to oppose God's Love -- hence, it is the self revoking its own essence, which is to desire God's Love.
   
   
3. Universalism is not opposed to human freedom, as is often suggested. Rather, human freedom is preserved and protected by the eternal persuasion of divine love, as proclaimed and embodied by Christ.
   
   
4. To say that Jesus shall eventually surmount all & every refusal -- even the devil's -- is hardly an abrogation of freedom, but rather a vindication of Love & the "freeing" of freedom in theosis.
   
   
5. There is a difference between "aeon" (indefinite time, an age) and "eternity" (timelessness). The NT uses the former with regard to purgation, & reserves the latter only for God.
   
   
6. The interval of purgation may be long indeed. In fact, the "eternity" to which anti-universalists refer is probably this long interval, as they cannot conceive of eternity proper.
   
   
7. The notion that God would actively inflict retribution upon His creature, or that God would allow endless perdition (or annihilation), cannot be supported by apophatic or divine absolute-ness.
   
   
8. The difficulty of God's nature as love being also a despot that wages eternal wrath is more than the clay questioning the potter. That such conflation is utterly incoherent is a mark of the image of God that will not countenance such absurdity. "My thoughts are higher than your thoughts" is a statement of infinite transcendence, not discontinuity. That the thought of eternal punishment is (or should be) offensive is a sign that humanity has received God's revelation of His nature.
   
   
9. It is legitimate, even necessary, to interpret Scripture and Tradition under the rubric of moral coherence. Doing so is precisely the work of "the Spirit leading into all truth," a continuation of Jesus' hermeneutical instruction on the road to Emmaus.
   
   
10. Hermeneutics cannot avoid being essentially theological. Thus, one must interrogate the motives for defending the notion of eternal hell & divine retribution. What does such infernalism enable? What psychological & sociological structures are founded upon it?
    
    
11. It is likely that the old notion that eternal hell was necessary for evangelism & discipline was never valid. It is the knowledge of the Father through the Son glorified by the Spirit that leads to repentance & theosis. Alone. Nothing less.
    
    
12. It is true that since Constantine and Augustine, the majority of Christian leaders & writers seemed to think of Hell as unending torment, with no hope of change. But it is at least probable that before these two figures, the majority of Christians were universalists.
    
    
13. Universalism as above has not been condemned as heretical by Eastern Orthodoxy, despite the common assumption that the 5th Ecumenical Council had done so (which it did not), & despite some local anathemas saying so. Anathemas are not dogma & are often flawed.
    
    
14. Universalism produces a highly Christological eschatology. Christ reigns through the kenotic Spirit, exorcising the demonic, destroying sin and death, until everything is in voluntary and joyous submission.
    
    
15. This universal submission (with no remainder) of Philippians 2.9-11 is a free, loving, and saving submission. It is the perfecting of the person, vs the annihilation of person in despotic oppression.
    
    
16. The reign of Christ, in the actualization of "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth" is the "exorcistic" campaign of the Body of Christ against the antichrist structure. The demonic is constantly being evicted from the material realm. Permanently.
    
    
17. "Until I make Your enemies Your footstool." When sin and death are finally destroyed, when all "sinners are made no longer sinners," as Basil the Great said, then "God will be all in all."
    
    
18. It is inconceivable then that any should remain "sinner," after "Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire" (Rev 20.14). This verse is the goal of Christ's reign, the destruction of sin and death.
    
    
19. The lake of fire is the very fire St Paul describes in 1 Cor 3.15 -- the fire that burns up sin and death, but "he will not suffer loss, but saved as through fire." This is refinement, this is therapeutic. The sinner is made "not a sinner."
    
    
20. To suggest any other purpose for fire is to suggest another nature of God, and to diminish eschatology, and finally -- if Hell is made eternal, then the Lord is made to fail.

Baby Hitler, Time Travel, and Retributive Justice - Jason Clark

Baby Hitler, Time Travel, and Retributive Justice
(excerpt from Jason Clark, Leaving and Finding Jesus

The other day, at a party, I played the time-travel game with friends, which eventually became an in-depth conversation about justice, as all time-travel games do.

You know how it goes. Someone in the room starts the game by asking, “If you could go back in time just once, what would you do?”

After several obvious statements about buying stock in Apple and Google, and after the obligatory Flux Capacitor reference, and a joke about avoiding that street taco in Mexico City, and how I regret the hour and a half I gave to the movie God Is Not Dead, someone, let’s call her Angela, got altruistic and asked the question, “What about baby Hitler? Would you kill baby Hitler?”

There it is—a thoroughly enjoyable conversation hijacked. Suddenly the lives of over 70 million people are in our hands. Before I can say anything, there is always one guy, let’s call him Dwight, who blurts out too quickly, “Absolutely, wouldn’t think twice.”

Then Angela says what everyone is thinking, “But Dwight, he’s an innocent baby.” Everyone nods thoughtfully as the conversation stumbles into a debate about morality and innocence.

Then, Dwight clears his throat, “While infants are born morally innocent, since it is impossible for them to be born any other way, all men have chosen to be sinners from their youth, so…” But everyone in the room quickly yells down Dwight’s internet-stolen, sin-counting diatribe, even before he could retrieve the Scripture verse he’d memorized to prove his case.

Why? Simply put, this party is made up of people who have neither bought into total depravity nor approached Scripture transactionally in years. Also, anyone who has ever held a baby or has even a spark of a soul, knows there is no Scriptural minutia or moral manipulation that justifies killing one.

Even Dwight knows this, if he’d just shut up long enough to think about it.

Then someone, let’s call him Kevin, voiced a brilliant idea, “We can go further back and kill Hitler’s abusive father!”

For a moment, everyone sighs in relief. The problem appears solved until, of course, someone else—let’s call her Pam—asks a new but obvious question. “But why was Hitler’s father so abusive?”

Dwight nods decisively and then states the next obvious conclusion, “We’re gonna have to go even further back and kill Hitler’s grandfather.”

And there it is! Time travel exposes the flaws of retributive justice like nothing else.

You see, Hitler’s father was once an innocent baby, and so was Hitler’s grandfather, and so on, and so on. The problem with the type of “justice” that advocates retribution is that it creates a cycle of injustice, a cycle of child sacrifice, and the loss of innocence.

The kill-baby-Hitler-to-save-humanity time-travel-game? It doesn’t end until we have traveled all the way back to Adam. Then, of course, we realize that Jesus already did this at a cross—except Jesus didn’t go all the way back to Adam to kill him, and He didn’t go back seeking retribution. No, He went all the way back to Adam to restore, heal, transform, reconcile and make him whole.

“Father, forgive them,” Love said as He transcended time and space.

“It is finished,” Love whispered as He reconciled the beginning and the end, the before and the after, the in-between and the forevermore.

The fact is, the kill-baby-Hitler-to-save-humanity time-travel game doesn’t work, because retribution is a distortion of justice. Retribution is simply the fruit of an earlier injustice.

I’d like to suggest that a retributive understanding of justice is too small because it only focuses on the moment of injustice. It is a finite punishing approach to sin that condemns for eternity.

Conversely, Jesus, on a cross, revealed God perfectly as reconciling love, which is measureless and timeless. And so, reconciling love is the ultimate time traveler. He exists in every moment, all at once.

Therefore, His justice spans the entirety of our days, as well as everything before and everything after.

You see, bullies have been bullied, oppressors have been oppressed, and Hitler had an abusive father. Therefore, God’s justice must be expansive enough to restore and reconcile the bullied and the bully, the oppressed and the oppressor, the abused and the abuser, the five-year-old and the fifty-year-old, because, over the course of time, it’s the same person.

If justice isn’t about restoration, it isn’t justice. It’s revenge. And while most of the world is obsessed with that Tarantino flick, and while much of the Western church seems devoted to that atonement theory, retributive justice is nothing like Jesus.

The fact is, since before the beginning and after the end, God has always been and will always be like Jesus—there is no love that is greater.

Jesus, Measureless Love, before the very foundations of the world and after the sun has set, is on a cross demonstrating and delivering justice by laying His life down for His friend and restoring and reconciling all things. And that same Jesus is also risen! And from Him, and through Him, and for Him are all things. 

Suddenly, another fella at the party—let’s call him Jim—has a brilliant thought and says it out loud, “What if God’s justice is better than we think it is? What if God’s justice is restorative? What if we partnered with Him in this type of justice? What would that mean for our families, churches, cities, and nations? What could that look like in our world?”

“That’s a good thought, Jim!” I replied. “Maybe the next time we all get together at a party, we should play that time travel game.” 

Excerpt from, Jason Clark, Leaving and Finding Jesus

Website: www.afamilystory.org

Available now through Amazon

US Link: https://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Finding-Jesus-Jason-Clark/dp/B0BLQYTDDQ

CAN Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Leaving-Finding-Jesus-Jason-Clark/dp/B0BLQYTDDQ

Donald E. Wagner's "Glory to God in the Lowest" - Review by Ron Dart

Journeys to an Unholy Land (Olive Branch Press, 2022).

Review by Ron Dart

The title of this timely, autobiographical, and not to be missed book tends to confront the reader with a challenge. There is a predictable tendency to think of “Glory to God in the Highest” and, for those interested in the Jews, the Bible and Christian sacred sites in Israel, as “Journeys [often selective] to the Holy Land.” But, Wagner will not allow us such a luxury or indulgence—we are invited, in fact, to visit the lowest, some of the most structurally oppressed in Israel that are often seen by the naïve as the Holy Land. How, though, did Wagner come to the telling and challenging conclusions he did? Such is the pith and core of this finely told and textured book.

Glory to God in the Lowest is a tale told in 6 compelling sections: 1) Beginnings, 2) Moving on Up While Downwardly Mobile, 3) Journeys to the Unholy Land, 4) Doctor, My Eyes Have Seen the Pain, 5) Palestine is Still the Issue and 6) Liberating Your Mind: Zionism, Christian Zionism and Resistance. Each of the chapters tells, in a needful manner, the nature of Wagner’s journey from American conservative evangelical beginnings (none of us decide on our thrownness) with its uncritical, almost hagiographical attitude to Israel, to a seeing of the injustices in the USA to connecting American racial issues with the situation of the Palestinians in Israel. Wagner has made many a trip to Israel, met and worked with many Palestinians, published a few books on the issue, lectured widely on the American-Israeli Zionist connection, worked with organizations that deal with the troubling and persistent dilemma and tells a different resistance story in Glory to God in the Lowest.

Each of the chapters, section by section, unpacks both Wagner’s political faith journey as theological vision turns more in a prophetic direction from a passive and conformist one both within how he understands his origins in the USA and the relationship of the USA (and the many Christians within it) to Judaism and Israel. How does one dare to critique Israel, the oft opposition using the language of anti-semitism when done? Wagner is acutely aware that many religious and secular Jews are opposed to Zionism but many Jews and Christians genuflect to the Zionist ideology. How does one break the spell of Jewish and Christian Zionism, Wagner more, rightly so, concerned with the latter rather than the former (although the two are inextricably intertwined)?

Sections 1-2 in Glory to God in the Lowest prepare the reader (given Wagner’s unfolding journey) for sections 3-6 with their decided focus on certain types of Christianity that merge interpretations of the Bible with pro-Zionist and pro-Israeli conclusions. The final section sums up the needed for a “Liberating Your Mind” counter-cultural approach to the issue. And, not to miss, of course, is the many family photographs at the end of the book, “Endnotes” worthy of a slow internalizing.

Glory to God in the Lowest is an imperative read for those interested in how the mind can be imprisoned by a limited read and application of the Bible to the (Un)Holy Land—if an awakening is needed, if liberation is the goal, then Wagner’s personal yet searching insights in this book are an antidote to a worrisome slumber that breeds much injustice and distorts the meaning of peace.

Ron Dart   

Learning to Love as God Loves - Overcoming Fear & Racism - Felicia Murrell

Editor's Note: The following is a manuscript of Felicia Murrell's talk from the Open Table Event, in conversation with Wm. Paul Young.

FELICIA MURRELL

I want to begin by saying this is not an easy ask.

For me, AND is the bridge to our re-turn, our homecoming, turning once again to ourselves, to Divine Love and to one another. For me, I’m holding both individual responsibility to participate with the Divine in our integration AND collective activism in a world that is a conflux of bodies in different states/stages of being who are responsible for the systems, bureaucracy and structures that inhibit the livelihood and flourishing of all bodies.

Racism IS most definitely systemic. AND the fear, insecurities and incorrect interpretation of “subdue the earth” which has led to a patriarchal obsession with dominance (of people, places, creation, and things) is very much a heart issue that has to be transformed through an experiential knowledge of Love.

Dualism does not resolve tension; it only furthers the divide.

Yes, there are laws that can be changed. But even with more equitable policies of the 90s, poverty and mass incarceration, and wage and wealth gaps abound.

How helpful are laws if people’s hearts are not transformed? It only means that when power changes, laws change. One only has to look to our Supreme Court to see this at play.

I don’t want to get into a tug of war of facts or statistics so I’m resisting the urge to lean on a lot of data and history. Often we wield information to attempt to convince or sway someone. “There has always been...” is too often used to dismiss what is. And I don’t want to get into a game of comparing suffering or domination stories.

Information does not create transformation.

We have to trust Spirit for the part we as a society can’t do, which is heart transformation.

If hell is a state of mind created by the illusion of Love’s absence, then perhaps heaven is the awareness of the Divine within and our intentional participation with Love.

How does participating with Love aid in alleviating fear - society’s and my own?

Much time has passed since George Floyd was murdered. Since books by Black people rocketed to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. Since corporations made anti-racist statements declaring Black Lives Matter and people turned their social media profiles black in solidarity with the suffering.

What has changed? In you, in me, in the world... What has changed?

Did we rush too quickly to fix, to absolve ourselves of discomfort? To avoid the pain caused by a long history of messes made, realities ignored. Did we learn how to be sad together, to grieve with or just be? To allow the weight of the moment to be its own masterclass. Or have we rushed in brandishing our savior capes to plant a chair over the poop so our houses have an appearance of ordered cleanliness regardless of the smell?

Have we really slowed down enough to hear in the time that has passed since George Floyd was murdered? In that span of time, have we made space for people to vent and unburden their insides without crowding out discomfort, theirs and ours?

Can we name the most marginalized persons or people group in our local area, community, state, region and the nation? What are their concerns? What are their fears? What does their heart cry sound like? What legislative and civic changes need to be addressed to ensure they are empowered to live?

Pus draining from old wounds is a necessary thing to stave off infection. But not everyone can tolerate open sores.

Phobias and -isms have no place in the labor of Love. To that end, when we talk about restoration, transformation, I want to know who is actively and intentionally participating with the Divine in healing and liberation. Who are those unfazed by gore and know how to love with strong stomachs?

Who has learned to handle the gruesome, to sit in the discomfort of their own pain, to allow space for others to live in theirs?

As a child of the South, I lived in the fear that dripped from my family’s muscle memory. A fear that ordered my coming and going, my way to be in the world. Demanding that I be small, invisible. That I shrink myself to the tiniest possible existence so I wouldn’t be next. The next one to die. The next one to be raped or maimed.

Even when the white hooded robes made its way to the back of people’s closets and lynching and cross burning were no longer a thing, in the South we knew there were still ways to be lynched, still ways to be railroaded. Still police willing to carry out long-held beliefs.

Today, as an adult, access to safety is still a constant I carry with me. I’m Googling “is this town safe for black people.” I have to consider inflamed racial and political climates when deciding where to live, where to travel, where to shop. There are certain towns that are still unsafe for Black people at night even though sundown towns are supposedly no longer a thing.

“Wait a minute…!” Clarence Jordan’s “Inconvenient Gospel” – Review by Bradley Jersak

“Wait a minute…!” Clarence Jordan’s “Inconvenient Gospel”
Review by Bradley Jersak

Clarence Jordan, The Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race, and Religion (Plough Spiritual Guides: Backpack Classics, 2022).

CLICK HERE TO READ A SAMPLE

“Wait a minute!” One day I may not be so surprised and delighted by the books Plough Publishing sends me, but they’ve done it again! Before I dive into the substance of Clarence Jordan’s Inconvenient Gospel, I must first commend Plough from a publisher’s perspective. The design and layout of the physical copy make for a beautiful product, bound on good-quality stock and a heavier-than-paper cover. More important, though, is that this particular book is a welcome addition to their “Spiritual Guides” series, which is a treasury of authors including:

• Dorothy Day
• Simone Weil
• Eberhard Arnold and Richard Foster
• Eberhard Arnold and Thomas Merton
• Oscar Romero
• Amy Carmichael
• Abraham Joshua Heschel

Seriously, contact Plough and ask for the whole set—it’s an incredible collection of great hearts and minds, and each work includes a distilled biography and introduction along with a treasury of primary source material from each author.

Now to Clarence Jordan's Inconvenient Gospel. The book opens with Frederick L. Downing’s fine biography of Jordan (1912-1969), his wife Florence, and their Koinonia community. Jordan is described as a white Baptist minister from Old South Georgia who broke every mold associated with that stereotype. The “Wait a minute!” moments on those first pages stack up quickly. Here we have a Southern Baptist-trained preacher (with a Ph.D. in NT Greek) who embraced nonviolence, racial integration, and communal living decades before the Civil Rights movement picked up steam! Utterly countercultural, monitored by the government, harassed by the Klansmen… his story is so gripping that when Martin Luther King Jr. heard Jordan was practicing what King was preaching, he said, “I went to Koinonia [Jordan's community] to see it for myself and couldn’t wait to leave because I was sure the Klan would show up and kill us both.” The Koinonia project, a gospel-centered, interracial, alternative economic project, struck me exactly as the title suggests—an “inconvenient Gospel.” 

After Downing’s biography, readers are treated to an Introduction by Starlette Thomas, titled “Reading Clarence Jordan Today.” Wait a minute! THAT Starlette Thomas? For those unfamiliar with her, Thomas is the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative; she's a practical theologian and blogger, and a serious womanist preacher in ministry. When someone of her stature shares her perspective on Clarence Jordan and his “raceless gospel” (not to be confused with “color-blindness”!), I am arrested in the most important way. I.e., she had my attention.

But then we’re exposed to Clarence Jordan firsthand in a series of thirteen of his articles and sermons. It's worth sharing the chapter titles to catch a glimpse of key themes from this “wait a minute!” provocateur. I'm especially bearing in mind the religious and social cultures of his Baptist audiences (churches, journals, and conventions from 1941-1955) and later, his Mennonite listeners (Goshen College) in the 1960s. 

1. Impractical Christianity
2. The Meaning of Christian Fellowship
3. What is the Word of God?
4. White Southern Christians and Race
5. No Promised Land without the Wilderness
6. The Ten Commandments
7. Jesus, Leader of the Poor
8. Love Your Enemies
9. Jesus and Possessions
10. Metamorphosis
11. The Man from Gadara
12. Things Needed for Our Peace
13. The Humanity of God

Through his penetrating messages, Jordan presses some truly inconvenient "wait a minute!" facts. For example, the radical polarization around economic and racial issues that are right now tearing apart our frayed society are nothing new. He was there and underwent that reality directly, overtly, frequently suffering intimidation from the church, the FBI, and the KKK alike.

Further, his active opposition against white supremacy before the Civil Rights reached a critical mass was prophetic and intensely risky. Hatred from what we now call the “far right” was still the norm then,… and couple that problem with preaching a gospel of nonviolence that refused to hate domestic oppressors or wage war against foreign enemies. Well, call him crazy, call him communist, call him the devil... and many did. But we cannot call his nonviolence "complicity with injustice." His nonviolent witness was an active living martyrdom... as dangerously naïve as Jesus' foundation sermon, perhaps? I hope so, because so far, “the ways that make for peace have been hidden from our eyes.” Jordan has a word for us all, right now. He IS a prophet to speaking to the 21st century. 

But even if I can follow his call to radical forgiveness, enemy love, and anti-racism, that only gets me through the Matthew 5 section of his Sermon on the Mount example. Jordan ventures into the implications of a Matthew 6 life—I’m referring to how seriously he took renouncing personal wealthy and possessions and heeding Jesus’ command [?] not to lay up earthly treasures for ourselves. Jordan preached and practiced a communal gospel reminiscent of the church in those first chapters of Acts, where everyone shared, and no one was left impoverished. "Wait a minute!" That’s a “hard word” for those of us (I mean me) with mortgages and homes, deeply attached to our pensions and investments. Maybe now that middle-class wealth is being gobbled up by inflation and greed, and a home is no longer even an option for my children, Jordan has my attention—and after him, who knows? Might I listen to Jesus, too—but this time with fresh ears in Clarence Jordan’s Southern-seasoned voice. 

It's worth saying how closely aligned Jordan was with Tolstoy, Gandhi, Thurman, and King Jr., in that same Sermon on the Mount tradition, living its practicability in his own way. Even without the same global name recognition, he is surely due the same honor as these, his peers. 

Finally, one last bonus “Wait a minute!” Have you ever heard of the southern retelling of the Jesus story, The Cotton Patch Gospel? I had not realized Clarence Jordan wrote was the author! In fact, he was composing it when he departed this life for the next. One might have wished he had more time for that endeavor, but then again, what a beautiful way to complete one’s journey. 

Andrew Kaethler's "The Eschatological Person" - Review by Ron Dart

Andrew T.J. Kaethler, The Eschatological Person: Alexander Schmemann and Joseph Ratzinger in Dialogue (Cascade Books, Veritas Series, 2022)

There is a tendency within the Orthodox clan to uncritically genuflect to the life and writings of Alexander Schmemann. There are also the leanings of those with a more conservative bent within the Roman Catholic tribe to bow to Joseph Ratzinger. Both men, in short, are held high within their respective traditions. And, there can be no doubt both men drew deeply from the wells of the life-giving waters of the fuller Christian Tradition. The focus, though, of this probing PHD thesis turned insightful and informative book is the way Andrew Kaethler deftly and discerningly unpacks how and why Schmemann and Ratzinger turned to the essential issue of “personhood,” as well as their affinities, parting of paths, and the difference it makes.

The Eschatological Person is divided into 5 chapters, two on Schmemann (in which “Eschatology as Context” and “Eucharistic Beings” is pondered and explored), two on Ratzinger (in which “Eschatology as Christology” and “Beyond the Self” is massaged), and a concluding chapter in which “A Matter of Time” takes front stage.