A Letter to the Church
[The following letter was composed and
sent on September 24, 2001 to various recipients in response to the
tragic bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It has
appeared on many web sites since then.]
Dear Friends:
Something crushingly new happened to our nation two weeks ago. Not only
have we all been shocked by the faceless character of these evils acts
and the sheer hatred that seems to have engendered them, we have grieved
deeply for the many persons and families that have experienced brutal
deaths. We are angry, and we are afraid. Our presumed safety and invulnerability
have been shattered and wrenched from us. I am wrung out emotionally,
as I know you are too. The future seems so uncertain and threatening.
But I write to say a few words about the nature and role of the church
in the midst of our nation and culture in the coming months and years.
I write to clarify my own thinking and to be in conversation with you
my dear friends. Most of us are imbued with an undying affection for
our nation, even though we may be earnestly critical of it at many points
in its life and history. Our democratic institutions are indeed beacons
of hope in a world still filled with despots and tyrants.
Yet it is this very affection for things ‘American’ that
causes me alarm for the future of the church in North America. All of
us are both citizens of the national culture and members of the church
of Jesus Christ. And sometimes the distinction between these different
realities blurs in our minds and profoundly affects our passions and
our actions. Then things American and patriotic receive unhesitating
endorsement from Christians and the church. The distinction is overwhelmed
and laid aside, and the church becomes the ‘chaplain’ for
the nation and performs in ways demanded by the nation. It then becomes
possible to preach a Jesus who endorses and sanctifies whatever the
nation—or the leaders of the nation—say is necessary to
our national security and future and the cause of ‘justice and
freedom.’ Jesus the sanctifier of righteous violence!
This situation is not new, but this time of crisis brings it to the
fore with startling clarity: the empirical church in America, with few
exceptions, exists under the lordship of the culture and does the bidding
of the culture. The basic attitudes and values of the empirical church
are at heart what Americans want, and the church is not happy to be
reminded that it serves another Lord and is summoned into existence
to be conformed to an alternative way of life from that which serves
the self-interests of the culture. That alternative way is the way of
discipleship to Jesus Christ.
What might it mean in the days ahead for each of us to be firmly aware
of the summons by Jesus to discipleship? It will certainly mean a ministry
of service in which the wounds and fears of our people are confronted
by inaugurating processes of healing. It will certainly mean praying
for the families of the victims and for the leaders of our nation. But
it will not mean praying for the deaths of the terrorists and dealers
in death. There is no doubt that the terrorists are swordwielders for
the kingdom of death and hate. But, for the disciple, they are also
the enemy/neighbor we are commanded to love and toward whom we are not
to return evil for evil. They are the ones who are also children of
God and therefore ones for whom Christ died. Just as Christ carried
the sins of the world with him to the cross, which includes our sins,
so too he carried the sins of the enemy.
The disciple of Jesus is called to a cross-bearing existence, which
will often conflict with the principalities and powers that reign in
the world. It is not easy to be a disciple of Christ and to witness
to a Lord who renounces violence as the legitimate means to any realization
of that kingdom God is intent on bringing. If we do not openly acknowledge
this is in the life of the church, then the church will simply be the
chaplain appendage to the national ‘war’ against terrorism,
blessing whatever means our leaders might choose to employ. Our discourses
and practices, which were meant to witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
can easily be infiltrated and subverted by the categories and concepts
of a just war against the enemies of ‘our way of life.’
To be a community of Christian disciples means to be that place in a
culture in which people inquire about why our brothers and sisters find
American life and governmental policies so offensive and hateful, why
they regard America as the enemy, the very Devil himself. It means to
be a community that is not intent on justifying one against another,
being aware that all sinful humanity has been graciously justified in
Christ Jesus. It means to be that community that is so given to peace-making
that it cannot pick up the gun in the name of Jesus and his peace. It
means to be that place where the works of love are the first order of
business. It means to be that place where people honestly believe—and
live as though they believe—that Christ is Lord not only of the
church but also of the whole of human history and the cosmos. It means
to be that place in which the Creator of the world is not understood
as the vengeful enemy ready to destroy the world in the blink of the
eye, but is instead worshipped as the One who gives life and became
incarnate in order to reconcile lives, to welcome sinners, and to summons
folk to a new way of existence. That is the sort of community that was
launched in history by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the
Jew. Needless to say, history is full of pretenders to be the
community Jesus launched into space and time.
When the church is truly a community of disciples of Jesus, it is an
open community of faith seeking understanding. It promotes practices
of inquiry, questioning, and seeking and of honesty and truth-telling
even in the face of fear, dread, and threat. Such a community, through
the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, is capacitated with an uncommon
courage.
It will be excruciating—cross-bearing—to be the church of
Jesus Christ in the days ahead. Many of you are pastors, and your ‘servant
leadership’ will be sorely taxed as to whose servant you are.
To be the church of Jesus Christ will require courage and a ‘supernatural’
hopefulness. I will be praying for you as you find your courageous and
discerning ways to be a servant of Jesus Christ.
As many of you know, my two volume systematic theology, A Grammar
of Christian Faith, will be forthcoming around the beginning of
the new year. I explore in some detail the grammar of being the church
and a disciple of Christ. The whole text hews to the explication of
the following definition of the church, which you might find helpful:
The church is that liberative and redemptive
community of persons
called into being
by the Gospel of Jesus Christ
through the Holy Spirit
to witness in word and deed
to the living triune God
for the benefit of the world
to the glory of God.
It takes two volumes to begin to unpack what all this means! But at
least it means that the church is not called into existence by the American
way of life, not called into existence in order to extract justice from
evil doers, not called into existence to endorse any given political
regime, and not called into existence to protect Christians and wreak
vengeance on nonchristians. But it does exist for the ‘benefit
of the world,’ though not on the world’s own terms of what
it would find most beneficial as an endorsement of the way it prefers
to live.
But, as many of you have heard me say in less troubling times, if you
do not find this definition helpful, at least these questions are crucial
for each of us:
1. What is the mission of the church?
2. What is the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
3. Who is God and what are God’s ways with the world?
4. Who are our brothers and sisters?
5. Who then is Lord of the church and the Christian? Who is Lord of
my life?
When the church in its practical life is unclear about how to answer
these questions, then its life will be a miasma of disarray and confusion.
So do not let anyone say that theology does not matter here. It desperately
matters who we think God is and how we are called to live. Of course,
real theology is inseparable from the practices that shape the lives
of folk. But I fear that more church folk in America are willing to
die for America than to die for the sake of the peaceable Lordship of
Jesus Christ. Make no mistake about it, that sense for ‘America
first’ is a theological belief; it is just that it is a pagan
theology as old as humankind and the protection of the clan from the
dangerous stranger and outsider.
Let us put our Christian theological caps on and realize how pervasive
the passion of hatred is in our world, and not just among terrorists.
Hatred arises in the hearts of folk who think that they are victims
of another’s violence, and hatred typically thinks its passion
is a justified response to the harm and wounds of the enemy. In that
guise, hatred is quite simply one of the great engines perpetuating
sin in human history. Hatred wants revenge, wants retaliation, wants
‘justice,’ for only that which ‘repays’ the
evil doer is adequate to the harm done to the hater. When we stand in
dismay at these terrorist haters, we have only to look in the mirror
to see the structure of thinking that generates such passionate hate.
The vicious cycle of harm-hatred-violent revenge-presumed justice-harm-hatred…goes
on until it is broken. Violence itself can never break that cycle. The
kingdom about which Jesus talked and the cross he bore intend the breaking
of that cycle and the coming of a new day of peace. So too the disciple
of Jesus intends a way of life that breaks that cycle of violence and
seeks alternative ways of resolving human conflict and defusing the
sources of hatred within us and among us. In the context of the disciple
church, the justice God seeks is not unremitting retribution and just
deserts but the forgiving and merciful pursuit of human flourishing
in peace.
A word now even for those among us who are confirmed ‘just war’
advocates and ready to retaliate with a sense of justice on our side,
consider carefully the sort of world in which we now live and the possible
consequences of retaliating with too much force. First, ‘we’
run the risk of killing many nonterrorist innocent folk. Second, ‘we’
run the risk of galvanizing a restless, resentful mass of transnational
Arabs into a fierce and unyielding militancy under the banner of Islam.
Islam itself does not require that, but the enemies of America will
use it that way. A world war pitting Arabic Islam against the West would
be a demonic war that would darken and poison life for generations—for
centuries—around the whole world.
When I realize that this past century witnessed the greatest numerical
slaughter of persons in human history and that much of that slaughter
was carried out for the sake of some cause that appealed to justice—justified
violence against those who do not deserve to live and whose lives can
be sacrificed for the sake of some ‘righteous’ historical
future—I want to put the word ‘justice’ in the cupboard
so that we might have a respite from its vagaries of usage.
This letter is not intended as an indictment against those in our churches
who are serving or will be called to service in the military. We must
pray for them and their safe keeping and that they come home intact
and not ravaged by the acts of violence they will be asked to perform.
But we, as the church of Jesus Christ, dare not pray that whatever harm
they are commanded to inflict on the ‘terrorists infidels’
be blessed in the name of Jesus.
In conclusion, I simply ask the church to be the church of Jesus Christ.
Refuse to be the servant of any other lord. Pray for guidance by the
Holy Spirit. Love generously, do not be overcome with fear, and remember
who you are and who those who hate you are: you are both the ones for
whom Jesus died and rose from the grave. But do not fall into being
just another ideological critique of America’s ideology. You do
not need to be grounded and proficient in the discourses of democratic
liberal pluralism or in those of conservative republicanism in order
to have a pertinent theological witness to the nation and the world.
Just be the church of Jesus Christ! Be the church and let your witness
be faithful, truthful, and peaceable.
I trust all of you have thought these thoughts prior to my mentioning
them. I write to clarify my own thinking and in the hope that my words
might be upbuilding to the church during this time of fear, confusion,
grief, and passionate avowals of retaliation. I welcome your responses
extending this conversation beyond the confines of this mailing.
Finally, let us remember that we Christians believe that there is a
Sovereign and Almighty power already at work in the world and for whom
things impossible for humans become possible. That Almighty power is
the Alpha and Omega Lover of the world, the Wisdom and Word at the source
of all things good, and the crucified Lamb who has taken the sins of
the whole world into an everlasting tabernacle of forgiveness and hope.
May the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be among you.
Joe R. Jones
© Joe R. Jones