Let my people go so that they may (not) Worship the (un)god! (original) (raw)
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This book is an attempt to make sense of, on the one hand, the intersection between Christianity, place, and identity, and on the other, the relationship between church, civil society, the market and the state. This opening sentence lays out the considerable challenge Luke Bretherton sets himself in his latest book. To a large extent, the book does indeed do what it says on the tin. Bretherton starts with some big questions such as, "What are the limits of the state? What are the limits of money? And what are the limits of communities?" 3 In assessing previous attempts to answer these questions, Bretherton warns of the dangers facing the church, chief among which are the threefold risks of co-option (in which the church is construed by the state as a constituency in civil society seeking resources or being used to deliver public policy goals); competition (becoming part of an identity politics); and commodification (whereby the market construes Christianity as a product or commodity in the religious marketplace). 4
Your People, My People; Your God, My God
Presents an introductory discourse analysis and exegesis of the Hebrew text of Ruth 1:8-18 highlighting Ruth's speech in 1:16-17 as a key expression of the book's central theme (hesed).
Religious Protest and Religious Loyalty
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2020
In the accepted view, the basic disposition of believers is one of absolute obedience, humility, and lack of critique, doubt, or, indeed, defiance of God. Only through such a disposition do believers convey their absolute faith and establish the appropriate hierarchy between God and humans. This article challenges this view and argues that, in mainstream rabbinic tradition, the believer is not required to renounce his or her moral autonomy and certainly not his or her understanding of God and the world. Indeed, faith rests on such understanding; moreover, human autonomy is the mechanism through which humans convey God's goodness and perfection. Their questions and criticism are part of a persistent effort to close the evident gap between their assumptions about God's goodness and the flawed imperfect reality. The analysis focuses on rabbinic tradition but its implications go beyond it, presenting a model of a life of faith that compels subjects, as believers, to preserve their constitutive foundations as rational autonomous creatures. I. INTRODUCTION The accepted view, both within religions and in their scholarly study, is that loyalty to God entails an obligation of absolute obedience. Confronting or criticizing God is forbidden and viewed as a failure to recognize absolute divine authority-anyone questioning divine authority is no longer a believer. This was the view of John Calvin, who wrote: "The Lord, in delivering a perfect rule of righteousness, has reduced it in all parts to his mere will, and in this way has shown that there is nothing more acceptable to him than obedience. " 2 Calvin's stance does not reflect mainstream Jewish tradition, which hardly leaves room for demands of complete submission. In Jewish thought, the only representative of this position is Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who assumes that the duty of obedience places believers at the very heart of the confrontation between their own values and beliefs on the one hand, and God's command on the other. According to Leibowitz, this conflict conveys the deepest meaning of religious life that, in his view, is embodied in the aqedah-the binding of Isaac: "the highest symbol of the Jewish faith is the stance of Abraham on Mount Moriah, where all human values were annulled and overridden by fear and love of God. " 3 The aqedah is a paradigm of God testing human loyalty. Abraham is asked to perform a specific act-sacrifice a son-that is opposed to his human and moral conceptions on the prohibition of murder. Obeying or disobeying God's command is the litmus test of the believer's loyalty. Following Abraham, believers must renounce their standing as autonomous subjects endowed with ethical and normative fullness and become receptacles to be filled with God's will and commands. This view is directly connected to another, touching on the place of morality in Jewish tradition. 4 If Jewish religion recognizes the autonomy of morality, requiring believers to give up their human values 1 Thanks to Batya Stein, who translated this article from Hebrew, for her valuable criticism and for our ongoing discourse. Thanks also to Nehama Verbin for her detailed comments and her careful editing.
Chief Albert Luthuli’s Autobiography 'Let My People Go' As Political-Theological Critique
Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, 2021
Drawing upon the notion that autobiographies or life narratives contain and perform rhetorical acts, combined with the insights of narrative theologians that narratives are crucial for self-understanding and orienting oneself, the article focuses upon Chief Luthuli's 'Let My People Go'. Reading it as an autobiography, the article outlines, chiefly, the rhetorical acts performed in the text, considering their deployment within the narrative as a critique of the political-theological arrangements during the apartheid era.
Worship from the Nations: A Response to Scott Aniol
2015
Glenn Stallsmith responds to Scott Aniol's report on the ethnodoxology movement, which was originally published in Artistic Theologian (Vol. 3, 2015). Stallsmith fills in some of the history of ethnodoxology, connecting the development of ethnodoxology to the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Contemporary Christian Music movement. He then suggests different interpretations of the biblical passages Aniol cited in his original article. Taken together, these two articles by Aniol and Stallsmith provide an excellent overview of the development of ethnodoxology, as well as challenges for the future.
The Divine People, 2023
The rise of right-wing “populist” parties the world over has generated considerable anxiety about the future of liberal democracy. In fact, many of these parties explicitly endorse what Hungary’s Victor Orban termed ‘illiberal democracy’ – meaning a political system in which certain procedural elements of democracy (e.g. elections) remain but the laws and courts no longer aim to deliver equal treatment or protect basic human rights. In practice, illiberal democracy offers a way for nationalist movements to claim democratic credentials while legally discriminating against their purported external and internal enemies – all in the name of national preservation. While these trends are evident in countries around the globe, they are particularly present in contemporary Israel. Seeking to better understand these movements, the authors of this report set out to study the political-theological dimensions of illiberal democracy or ‘post-liberalism’ as it is often called. Of particular interest is the way that post-liberals understand three fundamental political concepts: the law, the state, and the people, all of which exist as theological categories within Western religious traditions. As a political theory, liberalism carefully distinguished among the three concepts and their associated institutions; this was particularly the case with the liberal ideal of law as disinterested and universal. In contrast, we argue that post-liberal political movements tend to collapse the theoretical and practical distinctions between these categories: the law becomes whatever serves the interests of “the people” (a rhetorical concept that need not correspond with an actual popular majority), with the state charged with securing its implementation. In undertaking this analysis, our study builds on the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s contention that modern political concepts are secularized theological ones, an idea expressed, for instance, in the notion of king-as-lawgiver. Every historical era has a corresponding political theology. Most recently, liberalism advanced the ideal of an impartial law that would be equally applicable to all, enforced by a disinterested sovereign bound to serve and protect the people. This too reflects a familiar theological scheme however adamantly its champions proclaim their secularist credentials. With this frame of reference in mind, we can interrogate the political-theological concepts that accompany the post-liberal project. This is all the more crucial because—however ironically given the avowed nationalism expressed by its champions—post-liberalism is a global political project that involves coordination by reactionary forces in countries ranging from India and Turkey to Israel, Hungary, Brazil, and the United States. The ideologues of these movements proffer an alternative vision of the proper relationship between the law, the state, and the people than prevailed under liberal democracy. By way of example our report examines two of these thinkers: the American political theorist Patrick Deneen and the Israeli-American scholar Yoram Hazony, who offer different, albeit overlapping, visions for twenty-first century political and social life. These figures voice familiar critiques of globalization, multiculturalism, and ‘woke’ corporations, but also break with many tenets of faith that defined twentieth-century conservatism – from rejecting individual liberties and (some) free market principles to turning away from the small government ideal. Both scholars advance political-theological visions relating to “the people,” either as manifestations of the “voice of God” (Deneen) or of a divine order supposedly built around the nation-state as its primary unit. However “the people” or “the nation” do not necessarily correspond to a demographic majority in either the United States or Israel, which is one reason why the ‘populist’ label is somewhat misleading. Rather—and here too we can see a fissure with last century’s conservative principles—both Deneen and Hazony believe a strong state is required to uphold and actively cultivate the sort of “traditional” moral values they hold dear. At present the idealized national community–made up of strong patriarchal families and tight-knit religious congregations, with social bonds coerced rather than freely chosen–only exists in small enclaves. Nor can these idealized communities become actualized under prevailing economic conditions, characterized as they are by two-income households, wage stagnation, and a miniscule social safety net. Far from representing a threat to liberty as imagined by Milton Friedman, the state apparatus is absolutely crucial to engineering the ‘traditional’ family and national community. It is important to note that Deneen and Hazony differ from one another in fundamental ways, notably with regard to their assessment of neoliberal economic principles. Moreover, Hazony grounds the sanctity of the nation in the Hebrew Bible while Dennen’s idea of ‘civic virtue’ is rooted, he argues, in a proper understanding of Christian liberty. Yet both men are noteworthy for rejecting the idea of individual liberty, long central not merely to liberal political models but conservative ones as well. They critique individual freedom from two directions. For Deneen, individual liberty comes at the expense of the common good, with self-interested individuals endlessly fixated on cultivating their authentic selves to the detriment of the communal whole. Government protections—for LGBTQ+ people, for instance—merely coddle this egoistic social order. Hazony, for his part, views individual freedom as inherently inferior to the collective freedom one supposedly enjoys as part of a “sacred nation” (goy kadosh). He has been particularly vocal in criticizing anything that would restrain the will of the people – from international conventions to the Israeli Supreme Court. This argument is all the more important to note in light of Israel’s rapidly unfolding judicial ‘reform’ push—led by the Tikvah-funded Kohelet Policy Forum—which aims not only to undermine the Supreme Court’s already limited authority to protect individual rights, but more profoundly, to curtail its independence by overhauling the process of judicial appointment. We argue that the common thread running through these two visions of the post-liberal political order is a renewed focus on constraint: just as people should submit to ‘natural’ social relations and processes—be they an unwanted pregnancy or heterosexual marriage—they should exercise loyalty and restraint when interacting with their political leaders, provided that the latter act in the national interest. The vision, from the family to the state house, is decidedly patriarchal and authoritarian. Sitting on the precipice of a major constitutional crisis in Israel–not to mention significant moves toward West Bank annexation–as well as ongoing political turmoil in the United States, our report underscores that the imperatives of nationalism and those of democracy pull in contradictory directions. In particular, laws and state institutions that operate on a discriminatory basis in the name of protecting ‘the people’ deserve wholehearted rejection regardless of where they occur. Liberalism’s ideal of equal protection under the law may have never existed in fact, but we contend that whatever replaces it will likely be much worse – both for marginalized populations deemed ‘outsiders’ to the nation or for those stigmatized as ‘traitors’ within.
Our Beloved GODS: 'Our GODS: The Hindrance to the Genuine One
2012
There is an urgency to reflect whether the GODs we love and serve leave us impoverished or give us life. We are overfed by numerous images of God today. Some of these GODs defend inhuman and exploiting approaches instead of liberating the vulnerable. These disfigured faces of God are laid upon us when we are helpless, or we buy them when we want to hide. Since these masks of god possess exploiting capacity, and dehumanise their worshippers they have no place in the kingdom of justice and freedom. All these GODs bring along some essential qualities to our own person and society. Their ultimate evil lies in the fact that they feed on the poor, the unemployed, the helpless, the disappointed, the abused. In a world of victims, it is imperative to know in which GOD one is led to believe!