Film, Faith, and Justice seemed to go off really well. I wasn't able to make all of the sessions, but the films, panels, and lectures were all top-notch. The crowd was appropriately diverse, which of course made it seem uncomfortable. This, I think, is a very good thing.
There is an extremely interesting editorial in the NY Times today which pulls no punches on the issue of christianity and politics. I have no idea who Garry Wills is other than from his bio at Northwestern, but I think his argument is quite compelling at points.
Particularly as it pertains to the actual work that Jesus did on this earth and its relationship to the political life we live now. I remember Dr. Clark at Covenant making the obvious point that the people Jesus came to were an entire nation dedicated to and experts on the impending arrival of the Messiah. . . and they completely missed him. That same myopia is evident in the Apostles and disciples who followed Him, but somehow christians tend to think that they are immune to it, that the radical alterity of the Word made flesh has been domesticated by 2000 years of theology, tradition, and televangelism. Consequently, there is a clear political pathway for us to pursue, and Jesus is an easy rallying point for that program.
Besides the obvious hubris of such a move, Wills' article points out the real inconsistencies of that position on the grounds of the gospels themselves. The fact is that some of the most powerful streams of theology and tradition are rooted in the Mystery that is the Trinity, the Logos, and the Incarnation, and the Otherness that breaks into this world. A politicized christianity, almost by definition, must elide over those elements in order to amass and manipulate the human power structures. Voters don't get really excited about, for instance, sacraments or liturgy, but give them a sinner to pit themselves against or a material object to fetishize (a tablet of the 10 commandments) and you'll have a bloc.
Of course, this is coming from someone who has been spending the last 6 weeks lending a hand to a film forum dedicated to the intersection of faith and politics. But I don't think that is entirely incongruent with Wills' argument. There is a difference between being political in the broad sense (working for the poor, advocating justice, etc.) and being politicized (Jesus wants GWB to be president in a particular way). The former comes from a response in all fidelity to those radical calls to faith, hope, and love; the latter forces a monologistic ideology onto that call and extinguishes its voice.
There's another interesting piece by Wills in the latest American Scholar entitled What Jesus Did. It briefly critiques popular evangelical conceptions of Christ and the work of the 'Jesus Seminar'.
Posted by: beck at April 12, 2006 07:38 AMThanks for the reference.
Posted by: paul at April 13, 2006 10:57 AM