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Simplifying Christian Anarchy

admin April 13th, 2010

I’m coming closer to believing that the notion of Christian Anarchy (for a quickie refresher on what Christian Anarchy is, see my previous posts here and here) is a very good way to think about living the Christian life in general and Christian simple living in particular.

But there are problems too

It comes across as a very negative way of seeing the faith. Even the name, Christian Anarchy, is negative if not frightening. Many of the works discussing it spend much of their time on what’s wrong with human organizations (“the powers” in the Bible), or ‘arkies’ (Vernard Eller’s shorthand for any of the world’s ‘archical’ or hierarchical organizations). Tolstoy and Ellul were not a cheery bunch of writers either! And my own foggy musings are pretty negative as well.

It’s never a good idea to describe something by what it is not, or to sell a concept as a glass half empty!

It’s also a very complicated idea to understand as well as describe, which makes it difficult to translate into something practical and useful.

Part of the problem is that the classic works on Christian Anarchy (which I’ll refer to as CA from here on) like those of Leo Tolstoy, Jacques Ellul, SØren Kierkegaard, Vernard Eller, etc., are focused on the theology, philosophy, or sociology of CA rather than its practical application. And although Eller clearly says that CA is not ‘anti’ anything, but rather is just being not interested or impressed by the powers, some of these thinkers are very much anti- government, anti-capitalist, or anti-hierarchies in general, giving their views a radical twist.

Contemporary CA practitioners often organize social justice programs such as Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (a very good thing) (http://www.catholicworker.org/) or promote radical political positions such as Graham Cameron’s (http://christiananarchy.com/articles/).

These are big thinkers and big doers intent on changing the world, or a significant part of it. But there are probably a lot of people who, like me,  don’t want to virtually take  sword in hand and march out to right the world’s wrongs, but merely want to live a good, and even occasionally courageous personal life where they are with the people around them. And most of us probably aren’t intent on tearing things down to do it.

And I just don’t agree that Christian Anarchy is primarily about being a social activist or political revolutionary. I believe that CA principles can apply to all Christians who are really trying to follow Christ, like Christian simple livers, and that we should be able to use the positive norms and values inherent in CA to help build-up ourselves, our congregations and our communities.

I also think that when you use the tenets of CA to create a social or political organization, you have already violated the spirit, if not the definition of CA by creating yet another arky. And since these organizations are created by mere mortals to carry out their own parochial visions, by definition they become just another worldly arky with all their natural human flaws.

… and so we’re right back to where we started – and we probably aren’t in the Kingdom of God yet!

So in an effort to see a practical and hopeful side to CA, I’ve started to think through the issue of practicality – and I emphasize the word started. I’ll keep you posted on my thoughts as they occur to me.

Here goes:

Life Among the Arkies

Christian Anarchy, as well as traditional Christian belief hold that we should live only according to God’s ‘Arky’ and not according to the world’s arkies or in Biblical terms “the powers” – rich and powerful people, organizations, and governments.

As I have defined CA in previous posts (derived from the writers mentioned above, particularly Eller), CA sounds a lot like The Kingdom of God as Jesus might have described it, in the sense that all of The Kingdom’s members would be joyfully living according to God’s law and Jesus’ teachings rather than the world’s values. That may actually be the simple definition of CA and its goal as well!

That would put Christian Anarchy adherents and its practitioners in pretty good company but, like The Kingdom of God as described in the New Testament, CA theory doesn’t give us a lot of help in figuring out how to actually live it as a practical matter. Jesus merely noted that various people were “coming close to the Kingdom.”

No membership manual! He basically said “just do it!” Of course He said a lot more than that, but mostly he taught by example and we have precious few of those examples in the Bible. It leaves me hungering for much more. I learn best through examples and I just get confused when I read things, and especially when I try to write.

So OK, how are we to behave in the arky known as the Kingdom of God? And how does that mean we should relate to, if we are to relate to them at all, the world’s arkies – our government, political parties, fraternal and civic organizations, the corner store and global corporations?

If these arkies surround us and we have to interact with them every day, and they are not to be trusted or followed per Eller’s view of CA, then what is left for us to do and how would our behavior be different from those who do follow the world’s arkies – often blindly or unknowingly – which would include a majority of folks in modern consumer culture?

As I first thought about it I really got bogged down in a long list of do’s and don’ts for living a CA life. In the end it seemed like hair-splitting legalism – and long.

So I took cues from the Gospels and my own meditation practice and things started getting simpler.

The World’s Arky Assumptions and Values

In our culture with its worldly arkies, we tend to pay attention, and often buy into, its arky assumptions, values, desires, and activities – often unconsciously and uncritically. Some of the biggest, broadest assumptions and values could be: “Growth is good (or bad);” “Look out for number one;” “You should always be or look young;” “Success is the most important thing;” “Make as much money as you can;” “The end justifies the means;” “Shoot for the stars;” “Everyone should take care of themselves,” “survival of the fittest,” “Cheapest is best.”

More specific assumptions might include: “Health care reform is good (or bad);” SUVs are good (or bad);” “People should always think you’re on top of things – buy the newest cell phone/PDA/computer/game/car/house;” “Conservatism or liberalism is good while the other is bad;” “The profitability of the company is more important than its employees.”

We believe these notions to be true only because we’ve heard them much of our lives. But where do they come from? We didn’t invent them.

These basic assumptions about life came to us via the thousands of arkies we know and love (or hate), whether they are political parties, corporations, the corner store, the Government, Rotary Club, Boy/Girl Scouts, or schools.

In the end most of these assumptions have a focus on ‘self’, what’s good for me or us, whether it is to be right, rich, powerful, beautiful, successful, or just happy. The arkies advertised these values to us pervasively, although often surreptitiously, and over the years we began to believe them. All arkies do this because the values they espouse support their goals and ultimate success, whether it is to achieve its mission, make money, have influence, “right wrongs,” (as defined by the arky), or “make the world safe for…”

So to a certain extent all worldly arkies are disingenuous because they aren’t primarily concerned about your, my, or anyone else’s welfare. Even when their goal is to be compassionate, like The Church (an arky if there ever was one), a social service or disaster relief organization, the arky itself takes on some of the less-than-compassionate characteristics of their founder’s and leader’s personalities.

An arky’s true goal, despite its hype, morphs toward promoting and maintaining the organization itself and the positions of those who own, manage, or work in it. Even in compassionate organizations, the goal is organizational success, and individual needs begin to take a back seat to the hierarchy (all organizations have them) and its arky goals. In arkies that don’t start with compassionate goals, things can be a lot worse if not blatantly immoral or illegal.

Living Under The Arky of God

So, after all this arky bashing, what’s so great about the Arky of God, and how would we live in it in contradistinction to how we live amongst the world’s arkies?

Simply put, we must live by the norms, values, and assumptions of God’s Arky (Kingdom) as found in such places as the Sermon on the Mount, the Ten Commandments, and the laws of the Pentateuch, and never equivocate or make accommodations with the arkies on these matters. We don’t put them aside if our employer arky, government arky, or our political arky sees it otherwise. We don’t ever allow arkies to be our proxies or stand-ins for God’s values.

This means that we live with equanimity and compassion about all things and all people whether we agree with them or even like them or not, seeing things as they actually are, not as we are told they are, and not judging but acting with compassion towards all people. Living this way can be easily inferred from Jesus’ teachings and it would be living only under the Arky of God, and not being led or controlled by other arkies of any stripe.

Living with equanimity means we don’t follow any arky’s predetermined philosophy, principles, rules, or hierarchical structures and organizations, none of which function purely with compassion. But it also means that we don’t hate, abuse, take advantage of, or misuse the arky and its people because we see things differently. We must be compassionate with them too. We just don’t buy-in.

Living with equanimity and compassion under God’s Arky would mean never consciously or unconsciously buying the “whole package” of any worldly arky’s mission, principles, rules, or advice. Instead we would try to see clearly, in an unbiased way, what the arky along with its hierarchy and rules actually does and how that affects people and the rest of the world. We ask whether or not any part of the arky or its actions are consistent with CA. When it is we can go along with it on an instance-by-instance basis. When it is not, we don’t “go along to get along,” and we may need to end our association with that arky regardless of personal consequences.

This, of course is not at all easy. It takes a lot of practice, honesty with ourselves and others, and support from our like-minded Christian community.

More important, it takes a reordering of our minds so we can see clearly with astute awareness and discernment – again a very tall order for most of us because we’ve spent our entire lives living according to what the arkies tell us while abusing our own psyches in the process.

I have found insight meditation practice in combination with deep prayer to be extremely helpful in gaining some amount of clarity in discerning my reactions and responses to the arkies and my personal relationships as well. Without this practice I’m not sure I’d be able to attempt it at all.

To close out this ramble, I’d like to add that I believe Christian Anarchy directly supports Christian simple living. Most of our self-centered consumer behavior is actually based on the messages and values the various arkies have fed us, and getting past those arky assumptions makes it much easier to live authentic, simple lives that are closer to Jesus’ teachings, and doing so without rancor or bitterness toward the world of the arkies.

God’s peace.

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“Just War Theory” And Simple Living

admin January 15th, 2010

Obama, Niebuhr, “Just War Theory,” and simple living are all of a piece.

It’s time for me to comment a bit on political and world affairs.

I hesitate to go there because this arena has become so filled with hate and vitriol. I also believe that we can live as Christians regardless of what any government or political party does or doesn’t do. However our congregation’s adult Sunday school has been discussing President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and his use of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Just War Theory in it. This got me thinking about the theory, foreign policy, Christian morality, and its relationship to Christian simple living.

Niebuhr, of course, was one of America’s preeminent protestant theologians in the 20th Century who taught for many years at Union Theological Seminary. He is known for his mentoring relationship with German minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church, his writings on Just War Theory, and a number of critical books on other theological topics.

Niebuhr and others, most recently Barak Obama in his Nobel speech, claim that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi-style nonviolence never successfully stops wars or conflicts. They suggest that Gandhi or King could never have succeeded in stopping or preventing the Second World War by talking with Adolf Hitler, for instance.

The theory holds that war and conflict are permanent parts of human life because of original sin, i.e., we are ‘fallen’ imperfect people, and we will always be falling into conflict. Because we live in this sinful world, therefore, we will be forced to exercise power in order to prevent the world from collapsing into chaos, which would not be the Christian thing to do. Rather than merely trying to prevent war through ineffective nonviolent strategies, we should strive to make war as moral as possible by preventing more suffering than is necessary.

The fundamental principles for doing this are that:

  • War must always be a last resort;
  • Force must always be proportional to the threat (never more than an eye for an eye…);
  • Civilians must be spared whenever possible.

So what in the world does this have to do with Christian simple living?

Christian simple living as I’ve defined it, is based on Jesus’ teaching that we should above all else, love and care for others and not engage in war or other acts that are destructive to people. This is what I call “Kingdom thinking.” It is a kingdom where we put our egos in our back pockets and consider the welfare of our neighbors first, no matter how far away or how much we might disagree or argue with them.

Part of doing that is to live simply so that we don’t use up more than our share of things, or use our ‘wealth’ or its accumulation, to abuse, oppress, or injure others, or injure creation as a whole which would be destructive to everyone. Rather we are to use our resources and our energy to build-up others, i.e., the community and the nations, as a whole.

This is a holistic, far-sighted, and patient approach to life which I think is at considerable odds with Just War Theory.

I believe that the notion of the just war is based on the brain wiring we are all, unfortunately, born with. That is, we are biologically and emotionally pre-programmed to use fight-or-flight responses. If a threat of any kind arises, we automatically want to either fight back (go for the jugular) or flee from the threat. Neither of these, of course, leads to peace.

The fight-flight response pretty much prevents us from engaging in long-term, proactive prevention and peacemaking efforts – the kind of thing Jesus has been asking us to do. In fact, much of the peacemaking that does go on today is focused on stopping existing conflicts, and even though that is a step in the right direction, it is not based on long-range or holistic thinking. Reducing current conflicts means that we are still focused on the conflict rather than on preventing future conflicts in the first place.

Even phrasing this as prevention is off-target because the term ‘prevention’ by definition assumes there are anticipated conflicts that we want to avoid. This is still reactive rather than proactive. Being proactive, in this case, means creating the fundamental conditions that ensure peace, period. This would mean, among other things, creating healthy interpersonal, social, economic, and international conditions which optimize the quality of life for everyone. Prevention efforts usually focus on altering only those conditions which affect the current conflict. Although the ‘healthy conditions’ might be preventative, the thinking and psychology behind them and the strategies and tactics used to create them are just not the same thing as prevention.

Under such optimized living conditions, people would tend to feel more fairly treated, would have most basic needs met, and would have better tools and resources for dealing fairly with disagreements long before they became conflicts or wars. I say this having spent a great deal of my career in the health promotion and disease prevention business, particularly substance abuse prevention. So I’ve had some time to think about it.

Our knee-jerk fight-flight response usually kicks-in so quickly that we don’t often give ourselves the time to learn or practice being proactive. We don’t have the time to practice peace! We only have time for fighting the next war or, at best, intervening once a war is about to start. Long term Kingdom Thinking requires patience and understanding so it’s usually at best an afterthought for us – after we’ve counted all the bodies.

Here, then, is my biggest objection to Just War Theory: it enables us, or traps us in the fight-flight vicious circle, because it always leaves open a large opportunity to give up on learning, understanding, patience, and peace, and instead to reach for a gun – fast, because it has been humanity’s accepted way of dealing with things. It’s a huge loophole, which we most often make use of, that actually prevents us from ever learning to do it right.

So day-by-day we get further and further from the Kingdom, and more and more entrenched in the darkening vicious circle of fight-flight and war as our preferred way of life.

So what are Christian Simple Livers to do? Do we have a role to play here?

One of the just war issues is that nations and their governments are constitutionally incapable of keeping the peace through peaceful means. That was Niebuhr’s whole point. Fallen people and their governments can’t seem to do without war. And Obama was in total agreement.

Truth be told, if I were president, I would adopt the same Just War stance even in spite of my Christian beliefs and rantings about Kingdom Thinking.

The secular world of nations and governments is mired deeply in its conflictual DNA as a way of governing and surviving. Obama and Niebuhr might be right that even a Gandhi couldn’t have succeeded against a Hitler.

But I think that is exactly the point that Jesus was trying to make about the Church and the Kingdom. It isn’t for everyone! Perhaps it can never be for everyone. But it can happen – in the Church, if we take it seriously – we just never have. A community of believers can function in this way through care and concern for each other, even those with whom we have very strong disagreements. With faith we can learn to do it. It has been done before.

I do believe that people who are intent on it, and have faith in it, and have faith in God, can create a better community and a better society at least within the bounds of the church community. And it may well spill beyond the church community as it often has in the past. We just need a lot more genuine Christian community based on living simply, and still more spillage into the secular world. Let’s think in terms of millennia here, not just a few years. But even in a few millennia I don’t believe it will be for everyone, as Jesus said.

This is my vision for the foundations of Christian simple living: We are called apart to behave differently – to take a radically different path. We don’t need to avoid the world as the Amish do so as not to be dirtied by it, but to work with Jesus in creating the Kingdom, while being “in the world” but not a part of it. This is a mark of The Church. If we can learn to live simply, spare the earth, and act in just and compassionate ways with each other, we will have taken a few more steps toward Kingdom Thinking and keeping the peace. And we can continue taking more and more steps toward creating equitable and just foundations for a more peaceful world as we mature in Christian simple living.

Within The Church – within this (potentially) blossoming Kingdom, we don’t need Just War Theory – it would destroy us.

This approach is very much in line with what has become known as “Christian Anarchy” which I am a great fan of. I keep threatening to write a few posts on this and have yet to do it, so maybe that will be my next project.

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‘Caring for Others’ and Socialism

admin June 15th, 2009

A comment was posted last week regarding my 6/5/09 post,The Church Abandoned Christ – Should We Abandon The Church? It raised an interesting issue, although not one I would have predicted. So I thought his comment warrented a broader discussion and decided to copy most of my response here.

At its heart, the comment asks how much, if any, of our social and political values we can read into the scriptures. Since we all have our preferred views on these matters, sometimes very strongly held, it’s easy for us to have a strong bias which we can then read into scripture.

The question for me becomes, “have I done that in presenting Christian Simple Living as a way of life Jesus would recommend or approve of?”

The reader felt I was interpreting the scriptures to mean that we should create a socialist government, state, organization, or lifestyle. This was based on my statements that if we are to follow Christ today we should “take care of each other” as a part of simple living. He felt that my use of the phrase “caring for others” was not to be found in the Bible (and the exact phrase is, in fact, not in the Bible as far as I can tell) and that in suggesting this, I was suggesting a socialist lifestyle or organization.

I don’t think Jesus advocated for any particular type of organization including a socialist one – or, for that matter, any type of social, political, or governmental ideology per se – nor did any of the OT scriptures I’m aware of.

My take on the Gospels, is that they were rather simpler and more direct than that. Both testaments call for us to do many caring things for each other’s economic, physical health, and emotional wellbeing. The many instructions, laws, prophecies, and parables make it clear to me that we are to do these things for whoever needs them, rich, poor, friend, stranger, or enemy. For me, and I believe for many other Christians, this is what is meant by “caring for each other” rather than suggesting a socialist program.

The books of the Torah, especially Leviticus and Deuteronomy, often focused on economic equity so that no one was abused either by individuals, particularly the rich or the prevailing leadership, ex., the practice of Jubilee restructuring (Lev 25), seventh year debt release (Dt 15:1-81), taking the gleanings (Lev 19:9; 23:22; Dt 24:19-21), as well as the many prophetic demands on the Israelite leadership and upper class that widows, orphans, the sick, and the poor be cared for physically and financially (ex. Is 3:14 and 5:8).

Jesus took those laws and teachings a step further by insisting that we all carry these things in our hearts, caring about each other’s physical and economic health (especially for the disenfranchised, abused, sick, and poor) out of love rather than simply because of the law (Matthew 12:1ff.; 22:35-40, and 7:12).

Jesus’ teaching that the new law is love and that everyone is our neighbor. This requires action or it isn’t love at all, and Jesus demonstrated loving action in his healing and caring for people of virtually every strata of society.

I interpret these Old and New Testament teachings as caring for each other.

Apparently how one is to carry them out today structurally or politically is up to each society. Neither Testament seems to have been much interested in forms of government or social organization, as opposed to religious structure and practice.

I don’t believe Jesus advocated for a particular social structure, but rather, insisted that all people care for others as much as they would for themselves (”Do unto others…”), while criticizing the Roman and Temple bureaucracies for their lack of compassion and flexibility, and their failure to adhere to the law and the prophets (Mat 5:17-20; 12: 1-8; Mark 11:15-19 and 12:38-40). His teaching often directly states or strongly implies that we cannot live or act in a “kingdom way” based on being powerful or rich either in the Temple (priests, et al.), government (ex. Tax collectors), or business (ex. “the rich fool”), or through inherited wealth or power.

Although Jesus didn’t specifically use the term ‘simple living,’ the breadth and depth of what he taught about compassion, caring, wealth, power, and The Kingdom, can be carried out pretty faithfully in what I’ve described as ‘Christian simple living’ (CSL). CSL doesn’t refer to a political organization or social structure and doesn’t advocate for or against any social or political ideology, but rather looks for ways to live in the caring, responsible ways Jesus taught.

I DO believe that our current First World cultures (including The Church, business, government, and individual citizens) are now doing exactly what the Roman and Temple leadership, and Roman/Jewish society as a whole, did that Jesus railed so strongly against, and I believe these practices should be opposed by modern Christians wherever we find them. That was the gist of my last post.

Again, however I don’t think Jesus ever preached a structural alternative to the politics of His day. Instead he preached that we should all act on compassion and caring – which can be done within almost any political or social structure. In our world, you can do it in North Korea under communism, Saudi Arabia under a King, Paris in a democracy, an urban commune, or a cattle ranch in Wyoming. I keep intending to write a bit on Christian Anarchy which speaks specifically to this point… stay tuned.

The very early Jerusalem church, as noted in Acts 4:32 – 37, believed that they could best carry out that teaching by living communally. Apparently this arrangement didn’t last a long time, and I don’t read these verses as a command that we all structure our lives this way. I’m not sure that I would have liked the arrangement very much myself since I’ve always been an independent sort. But Luke includes this, I think, to illustrate the kind of selfless caring that Jesus intended and that we should all aspire to whether we live communally in the mountains or independently in a modern single family suburban development.