Advance the fight (nonviolently!)

Christians may work with others outside the church who hold, at points, overlapping interests and aims. In the face of neoliberal capitalism, that should include work to limit the market’s reach and reembed it in and subordinate it to the public weal. It should also include a forthright recognition of class conflict and the fact that ncoliberalism radically favors the wealthy’s welfare at the expense of the less wealthy and the poor. This last, in a world where policy debate tries to ignore or deny class, will incite complaints that Christians are promoting class warfare. But as William Cavanaugh wryly observes, that is like accusing firemen of arson because they keep showing up at burning houses. The church can and should brave nonviolent conflict, not least in its concern for the neediest among us.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 205-6 (embedded quotation from Cavanaugh, Field Hospital, 28)

<idle musing>
That's the final snippet from the book. I hope you've enjoyed the journey and learned a thing or two. I know it helped me put together pieces of stuff I had been noticing for a long time. To see in "named" was extremely helpful, just as Clapp said it would. Once something is named, it is harder for it to stay hidden.

I may post an excursus on one point in the book; we'll see. Meanwhile, the next book is J. Richard Middleton, Abraham's Silence. I'm not sure how much I'll post from it, as it seems to be one of those books where excerpting it destroys the argument because of how it is built up. But, we'll get at least a week or three out of it.
</idle musing>

Compelling, but not coercive

Third, and relatedly, beauty is compelling but not coercive. God, by Christian accounting, does not overwhelm us and crush us with imperatives. God is interested in our genuine love; God woos but does not rape. God stoops to the human level and accommodates human finitude and fallibility, culminating in the cross where God hangs broken and dying to take on human sin and defeat death. In these senses, God “evangelizes” not through implacable propositions, hemming us in with logical arguments, but through participating in our very earthly life and offering costly love. And there is something unsurpassably beautiful about this. Especially in a post-Constantinian, post-Christian world, we can no longer—to our own as well as to others’ benefit—attempt to coerce faith. We can, however, live it in a way that we hope will be beautiful and so draw others to it. The early church, itself literally unable to coerce participation, recognized this as appropriate to the very ways and character of God.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 201

Hero Worship

Have done, then, with hero-worship and admiration first and foremost of the famous. Look instead to a church or churches you know well and to everyday examples of faithfulness there. Think of the couple sixty years married, still delighting in one another and God. Think of the neighborhood church that stood up against injustice to immigrants. Think of your own church’s quiet victories of endurance in the face of setbacks and opposition. The point is not, again, to idolize or stop our vision on these exemplars, which all have clay feet. It is to treat them as icons we look through to see and focus on Jesus. It is Jesus alone who lived without sinning. It is Jesus alone who never fails. It is Jesus alone through whom all creation was made and redeemed.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 199

Word for the century

The Christian response to failure is repentance and the relinquishment of hero-worship.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 198

<idle musing>
Let those who have ears to hear, hear!
</idle musing>

Going back to go forward

In three regards, then—non-Constantinianism, hyperpluralism, and Epicureanism—the world today is rather like, or parallel to, the world of the church before the fifth century. We can accordingly expect both the Bible and early Christian traditions to have renewed, keen, and thoroughgoing resonances for our time and place.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 196

Ultimate control?

Lastly, it [the promise of the resurrection] grants us courage in the face of slavery to the fear of death, which otherwise can lead us to readily succumb to political and economic regimes that may, to keep us in line, wield their ultimate threat: death. Psychologists have found that people’s attitudes are most friendly to political authoritarianism when they are reminded of the reality of death. Christians are those people who, if true to their convictions and the victory of God in Jesus Christ, should be most impervious to authoritarianism. This was the case with Paul in light of his apocalyptic gospel. Paul saw the law as “ultimately in the service of Death. As Tedjennings explains, "Law and death are inextricably bound together. Death is the 'or else' of law, without which law does not have the force of law." Hence, the law is described in Rom 8:2 as the "Law of Sin and Death" (and see 1 Cor 15:55–56). The law requires Death, the threat of Death, or various lesser deaths (imprisonment, impoverishment, enslavement) in order to operate. Because it is fundamentally dependent upon Death (and thereby operates in the service of Death), the law contributes to the spread of Sin.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 182–83

<idle musing>
And that's why I find it so troubling that so many "Christians" live in such fear. If you really believe that God in Christ has conquered, not just death, but everything (see Rom 8), then how can you live in fear? How can you embrace a strongman to protect you when you are already "hidden with Christ in God" (Col 3)?

Just wondering…
</idle musing>

Courage

But did they thereby [through baptism] altogether eliminate the fear of death? I doubt it. What they may have learned was an increased courage in the face of death. Note that courage is not the absence of fear but its mastery. Failing to experience fear where fear is appropriate is not the Virtue of courage; it is the vice of foolhardiness. What matters, or what we might most fittingly aim for, is not the total absence of feelings of fear in the face of death but again a sort of bifocal vision, on the one hand seeing death in all its fearsome power, and on the other hand also seeing it overcome in Christ’s cross and resurrection. We might not erase all fearful emotions, yet we might master the fears and proceed in the face of death. We might no longer be frozen or take flight in death’s shadow.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 177

Silent scream

At the behest of an unrestrained market, we have in just over two centuries depleted goods it took millions of years for nature to accrue. Future generations may look back on us and, mashing up the verb squander and the noun scoundrel, call us something like “squandrels.” In any event, the damage already done by climate change is considerable. Beyond the overwhelming science, we can see with our own eyes the melting ice caps or the ice fishers unable to venture onto Lake Michigan in the winters of 2019 and 2020. Creation is speaking, even shouting now. How much more blessed we will be—cocreatures and coworshippers all, men and women, rocks and trees, dogs and bees—if humans relearn how to hear creation’s voice, not just at a scream, but at a whisper.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age,169–70

In cooperation with, not in competition with

Accordingly, in the face of neoliberal capitalism, which envisions creation only as exploitable nature, an apocalyptic perspective calls the church and the world to exercise not merely or primarily power over creation but power with creation. We may—we must—long and work for an economics that responds to creation gently and attentively. And as the climate crisis demonstrates, we must work for a sustainable economics, not one that assumes and promotes infinite growth in a finite world. Such an economics “does not idolize or fetishize nature, but it affirms that salvation is cosmic in scope, and it enacts a participation in Christ in which the sacramentality of all nature is affirmed in proclaiming God’s glory. The question is not so much whether we are to evangelize nature as whether we will allow ourselves to evangelize with nature and to be evangelized by nature”—which already, by biblical testimony, is constantly and copiously praising God.

All told, though we need not deny the place of the market, we must recognize that it does have a place—not as the all-encompassing and all-defining framework of being but as within, limited, and constrained by a surrounding and suffusing social and ecological matrix. Within that matrix, it should serve the rightful and prospering ends of society and all of creation. Its own survival depends on this.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 168-69 (embedded quotation from Stone, Evangelism after Christendom, 220)

<idle musing>
I would add, our survival depends on it as well! Relatedly, see this video of Sandra Richter on what the Old Testament says about creation care (compliments of Jim Eisenbraun).
</idle musing>

Exploitation vs. worship

Human solidarity with all of creation is twofold. First, humans are created by God with all other creatures. Second, humans, like the entirety of creation, are created toward the end of worshipping and praising God. We are creatures alongside other creatures. And those creatures, like us, find their fulfillment in the worship of the God of Israel and Jesus Christ. When we exploit creation, we abuse fellow creatures and coworshippers.

An apocalyptic frame disallows seeing the earth as a wreck from which some human individuals are rescued. Instead, Christ’s apocalyptic work is about the re-creation of the cosmos, human and nonhuman, toward the end that it be in proper relationship with God and its myriad cocreatures and coworshippers. Nor do we correctly understand apocalypse if we imagine creation—except for some lucky humans—being destroyed, consumed in fire. The apocalyptic fire is a purifying and transforming fire, not one of simple destruction. As J. Christiaan Beker puts it, “The apostle [Paul] is not charged with simply pronouncing the end of the world to the world. Rather that charge must be executed in the context of enlarging in this world the domain of God’s coming world because God’s coming world envisages the transformation of the world’s present structures and not simply their dissolution.”— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 167–68 (embedded quotation is from Long, Augustinian and Ecclesial, 155, 249–50, emphasis original)

Late to the party and not dressed for it

And let us note again, it [creation] is constant in its faithfulness and ever eager to praise. Simply by being themselves, all creatures exult in the abundantlife given to them by God. As Karl Barth puts it, nonhuman creatures praise God “along with us or without us. They do it also against us to shame us and instruct us.” By comparison, the human “is only like a late-comer slipping shamefacedly into creation’s choir in heaven and earth, which has never ceased its praise, but merely suffered and sighed, as it still does, that in inconceivable folly and ingratitude its living centre man does not hear its voice, its response, its echoing of the divine glory, or rather hears it in a completely perverted way, and refuses to co-operate in the jubilation which surrounds him."— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 166–67

Back into bondage

Still, many continue to objectify nature and separate humanity from it. And neoliberals in particular, prone to reinterpret everything in terms of the market, are hard put to see nature as anything other or greater than the provider of “natural resources.” Such demeanor inclines one toward the continued exploitation of nature. The “tragic irony” of liberal and neoliberal capitalism is that the very means through which humans sought liberation from the constraints of nature (i.e., fossil-based fuels) is a threat to human and global survival. The effects of air and water pollution, and preeminently the inescapable climate crisis, press upon us all a reconsideration of our heritage.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 150

Brutal truth

The early liberal attitude to nature is most famously summarized in the words of the Englishman Francis Bacon, a seventeenth-century philosopher, scientist, and statesman. Bacon not only objectified nature but saw nature as an object to be brutally interrogated and raped. So the scientist “must force the apparent facts of nature into forms different to those in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.” Another line, with which feminists have had a field day, advised that “man” should “make no scruple” of “penetrating into [nature’s] holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his sole object.” As Sheldon Wolin encapsulates it, nature for Bacon was “an object of organized assault.”— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 148

Exploit it! (But at what cost?)

Both those now commonly designated “liberals” and those designated “conservatives” have roots in a historical, encompassing liberalism. As such, attitudes toward nature—or what I would prefer to call creation—are widely shared across today’s partisan political lines. “Liberals” and “conservatives” alike have a heritage of humanity separated from the rest of nature and the reduction of nature to a mere source of “natural resources” to be reaped for human gain.

Karl Polanyi, writing in the mid-twentieth century, warned against the liberal propensity to reduce land to a commodity. Land, he protested, becomes “only another name for nature, which is not produced by man.” Such a reduction is in fact “entirely fictitious” But this fiction determined a world picture that set up liberal humanity to exploit land and nature—now, we see in an age of climate crisis—to our own detriment.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 147–48

Subject to futlility

The antithesis between the “church” and the “world,” which is certainly a Pauline and Johannine motif, here needs to be carefully understood. The “world,” in these terms, should not be understood as synonymous with creation. Creation is triply sanctified in the Christian story: all has been created good; Christ’s incarnation blesses all material, fleshly reality; and Christ’s bodily resurrection and ascension take transformed physical creation into heaven, beside the very throne of God. Moreover, the cosmic order, in Paul’s thought, is not sinful. It has been subjected to the futility of death through humanity’s sinfulness, not its own, and is destined for apocalyptic liberation (Rom 5:l2–2l; 8:l8—27).— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 143

But how?

For Christian engagement with the world, then, patriotically and otherwise, the key word is judiciousness, and the methods are ad hoc. The engagement is often messy, constantly concerned with particulars, and always ongoing. It is open to the neighbor (and even the enemy), whom Christ calls us to love. Accordingly, the church’s neighbor love “does not enter through abstract declarations of "loving everyone" but starts by singling out the neighbor that appears alien to me, the neighbor whom I love in the midst of her obvious differences. It is with this neighbor that a more general love can start. This kind of neighbor love is intrusive and subversive to neoliberal ways of relating and being, as an individual must encounter her neighbor on the neighbor’s own terms. To love this way is an affront to the exchange logic and value within neoliberalism because this kind of neighbor love makes no demand to reciprocate.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 137 (emphasis original)

Where then the motherland?

The point, in short, is that though I firmly reject the messianic, militaristic nationalism sketched earlier, I do not disavow a judicious, chastened patriotism. For the Christian, such patriotism is secondary in terms of identity. Baptism and citizenship in heaven trump citizenship in the nation-state. The Nicene Creed is the Christian’s ultimate pledge of allegiance. The cross and not the flag is the preeminent symbol of identification. The church is first family. God’s economy is wider [and] deeper than the neoliberal economy.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 135

<idle musing>
He's more willing than I to acknowledge the place of patriotism, however chastened. The problem as I see it from my experience is that patriotism too easily morphs into nationalism. The flag isn't content to take second place; it will continue to try to sneak into first place. Unless you are continually on your guard, you will find it once again on the throne.

Mind you, it isn't just patriotism, though. Anything around you wants to throw God off the throne. Think 1 John, the lust of the eyes, etc. That's why we are called to "fix our eyes on Jesus." If we concentrate on him, everything else finds its proper place in our lives. But, if we fix our eyes/desires on anything else, our priorities will become disordered.

Just an
</idle musing>

Grasping for Control

Thus [Luke] Bretherton insists that Christians, living in the time between the times, “do not have to establish regimes to control the time so as to determine the outcome of history. Rather, they can live without control because the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ already inaugurated the fulfillment of history, even as its consummation awaits Christ’s return.… Christians are to cultivate forms of life in this age that bear witness to these eschatological possibilities even as they stand in solidarity with those still suffering.” In doing so, the church looks to Jesus as a model of servant power: “To modern eyes, Jesus’s ministry can look like a refusal of power. But it is better seen as a refusal of the spectacular but vacuous power that Satan offers [at the temptation in the wilderness]. It is also a refusal to exercise the unilateral, coercive power of institutionalized means of command and control (power over). But in refusing power over, Jesus affirms relational power (power with).”— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 130, citing Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 136 and 132

The "sacrifice" of war

Accordingly, we commonly say that in war, we “sacrifice” our sons and daughters. Taken at all seriously, this amounts to child sacrifice—a practice common to some ancient religions but considered outmoded in modern civilization. Discomforting as talk of child sacrifice may be, we do not usually admit another religious aspect of our wars. For no nation sets out to lose a war, to simply sacrifice its children. Wars are fought to be won. The point is not to die but to kill. To that end, our soldiers are commissioned with priestly power: the power to purify the world of our enemies. In short, soldiers are preeminently not to be sacrificed but, like priests, to enact or commit sacrifice—the sacrifice of the enemy other. We thrust upon our soldiers the godlike power to kill, to decide who lives and who dies.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 123–24

<idle musing>
And then we wonder why they come home with PTSD…
</idle musing>

The glory of war?

As the early twentieth-century cultural critic Randolph Bourne memorably remarked, “War is the health of the State.” Nothing unites the atomized citizens of liberal and neoliberal states like war. Soldiers give themselves for a higher cause, while citizens back home may forgo some degree of comfort on behalf of the “war effort.” The usually disconnected, competing, and even hostile individuals coalesce against a common enemy.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 123

<idle musing>
And we're seeing that right now, aren't we? But how long will it last? It's not built on a solid foundation, so it will slide away.
</idle musing>