Sunday, May 24, 2020

How the cross shapes the Christian life

For the next three monthly meetings of the theology reading group we will be discussing Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul's Theology and Spirituality by Michael J. Gorman

In the first chapter, Gorman introduces the book by making the case for 13 propositions. Here I list the ones that I found particularly interesting and helpful.

        The Cross
3. The cross is not only the definitive revelation of Christ and of God (i.e., it is both Christophany and theophany) but also the definitive revelation of what humans and the church are to be.
         Cruciformity
4. The cross is not only the source but also the shape of our salvation, and cross-shaped living (cruciformity) means that all Christian virtues and practices are cruciform: faith/faithfulness, love, power, hope, justice, and so forth.
6. Cruciformity/Theoformity is a matter not of imitation but of transformative participation: being in the Messiah/Spirit and having the Messiah/Spirit within (mutual indwelling).   
 Dying and rising with Christ  
10. Paradoxically, cruciform (cross-shaped) existence is also resurrectional (resurrection-suffused) cruciform ministry because the death of the messiah means life for all who share in that death.   
Mission  
11. The church is called not merely to believe the gospel but also to become the gospel and thereby to advance the gospel, the church is a living exegesis of the gospel.  
12.  Becoming the gospel means embodying the missional practices of love, peacemaking, reconciliation, restorative justice, forgiveness, non-violence, and so on that correspond to what God has done in the Messiah. 
13.  To be in the Messiah is to be in community, to be in mission, and to be in trouble (persecuted) - simultaneously.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

What do we learn from the history of epidemics?

An epidemic provides a mirror on society: its values, its strengths, and its weaknesses. This idea is emphasized by Frank Snowden, a historian at Yale University. Last year he published “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present,” and there is an insightful interview with him in The New Yorker, ``How Epidemics Change History''.
Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are. That is to say, they obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives. They also reflect our relationships with the environment—the built environment that we create and the natural environment that responds. They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people, and we’re seeing that today.

[an epidemic]  raises really deep philosophical, religious, and moral issues. And I think epidemics have shaped history in part because they’ve led human beings inevitably to think about those big questions. The outbreak of the plague, for example, raised the whole question of man’s relationship to God. How could it be that an event of this kind could occur with a wise, all-knowing and omniscient divinity? Who would allow children to be tortured, in anguish, in vast numbers? It had an enormous effect on the economy. Bubonic plague killed half the population of full continents and, therefore, had a tremendous effect on the coming of the industrial revolution, on slavery and serfdom.
David Brooks in the New York Times also picked up on this idea of the mirror, reflecting on the impact of the 1918 flu epidemic in the USA.
In Philadelphia, the head of emergency aid pleaded for help in taking care of sick children. Nobody answered. The organization’s director turned scornful: “Hundreds of women … had delightful dreams of themselves in the roles of angels of mercy. … Nothing seems to rouse them now. … There are families in which every member is ill, in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food. The death rate is so high, and they still hold back.” 
This explains one of the puzzling features of the 1918 pandemic. When it was over, people didn’t talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to the flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I, and yet it left almost no conscious cultural mark. Perhaps it’s because people didn’t like who they had become.
There is a fascinating chapter, ``Epidemics, Networks, and Conversions,'' in The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, by Rodney Stark.  Pagans fled Rome during epidemics. Christians stayed and cared for the sick, including pagans abandoned by their families.
Here is the Wikipedia summary.
In a time of two epidemics (165 and 251) which killed up to a third of the whole population of the Roman Empire each time, the Christian message of redemption through sacrifice offered a more satisfactory explanation of why bad things happen to innocent people. Further, the tighter social cohesion and mutual help made them able to better cope with the disasters, leaving them with fewer casualties than the general population. This would also be attractive to outsiders, who would want to convert. Lastly, the epidemics left many non-Christians with a reduced number of interpersonal bonds, making the forming of new ones both necessary and easier.