Political Theology

I believe deeply the Church of Jesus Christ is called to embody and alternative politic.  Politic defined as, simply, the way human beings live with each other.  The Christian politic needs to follow the example of Christ, who, borrowing liberally from Philippians 2, did not consider power something to be used, but lived in weakness, suffered, and died.  Through this counter-intuitive process, he was resurrected, vindicated, glorified.  Christians believe this model is the purpose and intention of creation.  Our politics must look like Christ.

It's also become pretty clear to me that Christians cannot faithfully critique any system they are trying to control.  That doesn't mean we can't participate in systems of power, but we must be very careful not to attempt to control those systems.

Practically, that means in deliberative bodies - places like local or federal parliaments of one kind or another - that are genuine attempts to seek consensus and work together, align well.  I'm comfortable voting for a representative of my community, if I feel they'll honestly engage this process and not seek to dominate or unduly influence the process.

When it comes to donating towards or working for the election of representatives from other constituencies, that's a clear attempt to control the process and, I don't believe, can be compatible with Christian ethics.  The same goes for participation in "party" politics, where blocs of like-minded representatives seeks to influence the process.  Any deliberative body must seek consensus - simple majorities overruling unwilling minorities are incompatible uses of power.

With regard to executive positions, where one person is expected to make unilateral decisions, I'm unable to envision a way to do this in imitation of Christ.  If you had a genuinely compassionate, selfless human being, they would either be corrupted or fail as a government executive.  Those jobs are not designed to be done in line with Christian ethics.  I can't, in good conscience, put any human in a position where they cannot succeed.

Now, all of this does not mean I'd advocate disengagement from the process.  Christians can and should still protest and express their views on how people should treat each other.  The line must be drawn, though, in using threats or coercion to convince others of our positions.  The example of our actions, we must believe, are capable of "winning converts," rather than the strength of our arguments.

It comes down to control.  Am I attempting to get my way against the will of another.  That's not how Christ operated; it's not how the Kingdom works; it's not how Christians can ethically engage in politics.

Our priority must be on the politics of the everyday.  How do we treat our neighbors?  Feed the hungry?  Advocate for justice - not with threats, but with pleas to our common humanity?

If the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has both showed us how and enabled us to be truly human, capable of reaching our creative purpose; we must believe a Church, living in imitation of Christ, can facilitate the same transformation for the world at large.

God is in the business of redeeming creation.  It does not come through force or coercion, but through humble, selfless love; a willingness to suffer; and a commitment to engage politics with an open hand and not a closed fist.  It may also come in refusing to exercise "rights" we've been given as citizens of the world, because they violate the duties of citizens of Christ's Kingdom.

The Gospel Changed Marriage, Not the Gays

The following is my essay, excerpted from the book: Why the Church of the Nazarene Should Be Fully LGBTQ+ Affirming.  A lot of people have asked me to explain, scripturally why I feel gender should not be a factor in marriage.  Well, this is it.  Hopefully you'll read it with the spirit of reverence and respect with which it was written.

The Gospel Changed Marriage, Not the Gays

by Ryan Scott

"Surprisingly, the most compelling scriptural argument for Christians to affirm marriage between two men is our understanding of women."

During my time in seminary, I dove deeply into the scriptures for support of our denomination’s stance on gay marriage. If I was going to be a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene, I wanted to be prepared not only with a statement, but with a solid explanation for our beliefs. I found, though, the more I studied, scripture gave me fewer and fewer reasons to oppose same-sex couples and more and more reasons to affirm them.

At the core of everything is our understanding of marriage itself.

When it comes to a theological argument about LGBTQ+ inclusion, you can throw out the issues of sex and biology—the Church of the Nazarene already affirms that the most appropriate context for sex is within a committed, Christ-centered marriage. The answer to who should be sleeping with whom is simple: spouses.

From there, the only remaining questions are ‘Who should be in a marriage and why?’

If you look at the history of marriage and the evolution of theology both in scripture and after it was written, you’ll see a stark difference in how God’s people have answered those questions. There’s an obvious movement from marriage as a social institution to marriage as a fully religious commitment, and it mirrors the movement of women as property to the recognition of women as full equals (at least in theory).

While our wedding liturgy talks about Genesis 2:24 as the foundation of Christian marriage, citing Adam and Eve becoming one flesh, it’s an interpretive leap that may not be wholly appropriate.

There’s no mention of marriage at all in Genesis 2 (there’s no separate word for ‘wife’ in Greek or Hebrew, it’s the word for ‘woman’ that becomes the English ‘wife’ when translators think it’s appropriate). In this passage we find only the kind of holy commitment to one another we now associate with marriage. But it took human society, as well as the Church, a long time to get from one to the other.

Early human marriage was a simple transfer of property. Women were objects to be owned—first by their fathers and then by their husbands. In fact, this social arrangement was so unseemly to God’s people that priests wanted nothing to do with performing or solemnizing marriages until the late Middle Ages, when the power of the Church was waning and requiring clerical approval of a marriage proved a particularly effective means of social control.

The religious rules around marriage all had to do with property rights. Fornication was a violation of a father by ‘defiling’ his property (daughter) and adultery was a violation of a husband by ‘defiling’ his wife—again, a property crime.

There’s no scriptural prohibition of extra-marital sex by men, so long as these other rules are observed. There was no written recrimination for, say, a man sleeping with a prostitute or his own servant girl, until Paul started calling it out by name in 1 Corinthians.

Modern conservative Christian sexual ethics essentially took the scriptural chastity rules for women and applied them to men, where it just as easily could’ve gone the other way (which is essentially what modern liberal Christian sexual ethics look like). In either event, things changed because we went from viewing women as property to viewing them as people.

Galatians says there is “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” It’s not saying that these distinctions don’t matter, that men and women are the same; it’s saying these distinctions are not of degree. Jews are not better than Gentiles. Slaves do not have a different status from free people. Men and women are not fundamentally different in value.

Many use this verse to support LGBTQ+ inclusion. I do not. I don’t believe inclusion can be proof-texted, just as exclusion cannot be derived from any one or series of verses. Affirmation of gay marriage arises as the necessary theological conclusion of broader arguments made in scripture. Our understanding of marriage has changed because of the massive theological shifts made in the process of God’s people better understanding how God has called us to live.

We see, even in the Hebrew scriptures, the beginning of the marriage analogy for the relationship between God and God’s people that continues through the New Testament. The Church is the bride of Christ and God’s faithfulness to us becomes the template for our marriage relationships with one another.

Paul introduces the notion of mutuality in marriage that was earth-shattering for the time. 1 Corinthians 7 teaches that women share ownership, not only of their own bodies, but of their husbands’ bodies as well, and that sexual practice in marriage should be by mutual consent. He’s tearing apart the notion of marriage as property exchange and recognizing the relational aspect, something we take for granted today, but is a relatively recent development.

Up until the last 100 years, almost no one married for love. Sure, spouses might have loved each other and certainly love can grow in any relationship where it’s fostered. But love as a primary motivation for marriage wasn’t even contemplated at any point in the Bible’s writing.

The point of marriage was to solidify or improve social conditions, to secure peace between powerful families, or to enhance the economic status of one or both parties. This was built primarily around having children. The purpose of marriage was to produce heirs, which is why barrenness is seen as such a curse throughout the bible.

For most of human history, if you wanted love, you looked outside your marriage. This is, again, why Paul’s words are so ground-breaking: husbands love your wives as Christ loves the Church. For Paul, and subsequently for Christian theology, marriage was not just about meeting your wife’s physical needs to enable child-bearing, but to care for her as a person. Your beloved is God’s beloved, and you must care for them the way God cares for them.

This modern, thoroughly scriptural, thoroughly Christian understanding of marriage is then read back into Genesis 2. As God declares “the two become one flesh,” we understand a far deeper meaning than anyone at the time of its original writing could’ve comprehended.

Genesis communicates the human need for connection and community. We are not designed to be alone. We need partners. We need each other. Marriage has become our best earthly approximation of the connection we were created to have with each other.

We embrace Jesus’ teaching from Matthew that in the Kingdom “people will neither marry nor be given in marriage,” because we’ll be able to love everyone as God intends. Until that time, we commit to focusing on one relationship above all others.

Thus, our understanding of Christian marriage is about as far from the social regulation of female property transfer as it could possibly be. We have completely transformed the institution into something beautiful and important and good, but also something unrecognizable to the writers and first readers of scripture.

So, no, Paul doesn’t talk about gay marriage, likely because he couldn’t en- vision it. It wouldn’t make any sense in his social context. He was just beginning to apply Christian principles to what was an entirely secular economic and social system. At the same time, though, gay marriage makes perfect sense in our contemporary context, largely because of the ways in which Paul himself reframed the Christian understanding of marriage.

The final piece of this puzzle is gender. Genesis talks about a man and a woman. Male and female biology fit together for procreation in obvious ways. The analogies in scripture are gendered, referencing husband and wife. But, if Christian marriage, as we understand it, is two people committing to God, and to each other, to love their spouse as God loves God’s people, does it matter what gender those two people happen to be?

It can’t matter—not unless we’re willing to require men and women to inhabit specific and differentiated gender roles. If there is some innate difference (beyond our sex organs) that makes men and women truly unique from each other, then there’s some reason to make a gender requirement in marriage.

But scripture doesn’t support that differentiation, not anywhere from Genesis to Revelation.

Sure, scripture was written in the midst of a patriarchal society; but much like the theological evolution of marriage, it also challenges the faithful to a broader, more egalitarian understanding of men, women, and humanity in general.

There’s insufficient space here to fully explain the equality inherent in Genesis 2, but the literature is voluminous that the spouse God crafted for the first human was an equal and complementary being. For years, we’ve gendered this complementarity, relying on stereotypes that women are sensitive and men are strong, women are carers and men are conquerors, that women and men possess uniquely different traits that must fit together for marriage to work.

We don’t have to deny this complementary picture of marriage to expand its definition beyond a man and a woman. If anything, those gendered stereotypes limit both men and women from being the full, beautiful creation God intends them to be. How much pain and misery have we caused by communicating there are only certain ways to be “real” men and women?

Things are never that simple.

I do most of the cooking in our home. I do the shopping, and I stayed home when our daughter was young. My wife asks for power tools for her birthday, makes most of the money, and enjoys getting her hands dirty far more than I do.

Yet she’s also the decorator, finely attuned to aesthetics, while I spend much of my
free time watching sports. We don’t fit any gendered stereotype or its opposite. We’re unique individuals who happen to be male and female. What’s more important is that we complement each other in ways that make our marriage stronger than either of us could be on our own. We got married because we were convinced we could do more for God’s Kingdom together than we could do separately.

I know plenty of same-sex couples for whom the same is true, whose marriages are a blessing to them, to God, and to the world. I see no reason to deny them an equal place in the Kingdom of God or in the Church of the Nazarene. Christ calls us to break down barriers, cross lines of division, and embrace that self-giving love of God which is the only hope for the salvation of the world.

The Church should be at the forefront of recognizing, affirming, and embracing marriage for all people as it is the natural next step in the Spirit-led transformation of marriage from misogyny and oppression to freedom, equality, and love.

Adam, Isaiah, and Paul may not have understood what they were starting at the time, but God is always at work among the faithful to transmit and trans- form God’s world into what it was created to be. Recognition and affirmation of LGBTQ+ couples is not a capitulation to culture, but a gospel-infused counter-cultural movement to further welcome God’s coming Kingdom.

Christians and Violence

 

What makes the Christian perspective on violence different is the goal. Christians believe the future is a world without fear or death, a world in which violence does not exist. Our goal is not to minimize violence – we have not succumbed to the death-dealing notion that it is inevitable – we believe there is an end to violence, that it will be completely eliminated.

Christians take a long view on these things. The world which is coming may not (almost certainly will not) be realized in our lifetimes. We are committed to a lifestyle that may produce no visible results before we die. It may seem pointless and foolhardy in our present; this is why it’s called faith.

In light of that, killing can never be justified. Taking a life should be something with which the killer wrestles for the rest of their days. It should be conflicting and troubling; feelings of guilt should not be unexpected. Whether it is abortion or war or self defense, killing may, in fact, be the preferred option in a given scenario, but that does not make it “right.”

It’s never heroic to kill, even in the name of justice or the defense of innocence, even if you never regret doing it. Heroism is an action of discipline or creativity or plain dumb luck whereby someone stumbles into a non-violent means of making a real difference in the world. No action ever makes a person a hero or a villain, because no human being can ever be entirely defined by what they do.

History has shown us that opposing violence with violence only compounds the problem, even if some short term benefits are realized. If the goal is to minimize violence, there’s some argument for force opposing force, but if the goal, as it is for followers of Jesus Christ, is to realize a world without violence; it is never the answer.

Yes, we live in a world where killing exists and one where there will continue to be people who kill with the best of intentions. Our response, though, should not be to absolve them of guilt or normalize those actions – it should be to wrestle and grieve alongside them as they process the primal violation of existence that is the taking of life. Our job, as it is at all times, is to love unconditionally, because it is only love – especially love of those we would like to kill – that will ever end violence.

A Spirit of Pain and Optimism

I spent the past weekend at Mid-Atlantic District Assembly - the annual gathering of Church of the Nazarene congregations from DC, Delaware, Maryland, the panhandle of WV, and Central PA.  It was our first opportunity to be together in person since 2019.  We were in a new location, with a new schedule, so a lot of the weekend was feeling things out.  I definitely didn't get to have the same kinds or the same number of conversations I've been used to in the past.

Those conversations I did have, though, were really interesting.  COVID has allowed a lot of congregations to break bad habits and engage in loving people creatively and with intention in ways that previous structures didn't allow very well.  I felt a real sense of emphasis and attention on connection - which makes total sense after a prolonged period of being separate.

I know the last two years were a real struggle for a lot of pastors.  There were internal battles over QAnon and mask wearing perpetuated by the continued alignment of fundamentalist evangelicalism and far right politics.  I heard very few of those discussions, though.  While that kind of conversation will not be going away any time soon, the pastors I call peers are really dedicated to the gospel and, as hard as it is, have generally found ways to speak into the encroaching cultures with gospel truth.

The place where that's not happening though, is in how we deal with LGBTQIA+ conversations.  It's an issue becoming increasingly relevant to Nazarene congregations, who have a pastoral necessity to engage in tough conversations about sexuality, chastity, and morality in an atmosphere that encouraged entrenchments on extreme positions with an existential fear that allowing for a consideration of the opposite position equals defeat or betrayal.

As I've explained to my local mainline protestant pastor friends, "The Church of the Nazarene can't even have calm, rational theological conversation about the sinfulness of consuming a drop of alcohol; we're definitely not ready for discussions of human sexuality."

We are, after all, an extremely conservative denomination (80+% of Nazarenes in the US voted for Trump - and many of our other world areas, where the vast majority of members live, are often even more conservative in both theology and politics), that only just recently removed the word "abomination" from our core language about queer folks - a statement that falls distinctly into "Side B" language, despite common practice that won't even allow that much leeway in most contexts.

I heard a number of anecdotal references to the conversation our General Superintendents have with candidates before they're ordained.  I'm hesitant to share them without real confirmation, but it's in line with the institutional shift, so I'll do it for now - but if any recent ordinands or General Superintendents want to disabuse me of this notion, I'll gladly apologize and amend.

I've been told the GS will make clear that ordinands can't drink alcohol and that they must be in line with the current statement on LGBTQIA+ issues.  This is interesting, because it makes a distinction between practice and belief.  They're not asking pastors to agree with the statement on alcohol (which could be much better, as I've discussed before), just to follow it.  They seem to be setting a higher bar when it comes to queer people.

I disagree with the position of the Church of the Nazarene.  I think it should be changed.  I've written about it before and will continue to advocate as we move forward.  I disagree with the position, but I've also committed not to perform a wedding my accrediting denomination doesn't allow me to officiate.  It's essentially the position they seem to be asking of clergy in terms of alcohol - you don't have to like our position, but you need to follow it.

That they're taking a harder line when it comes to LGBTQIA+ issues is completely in line with the institutional conservation model the Church of the Nazarene has been operating in for a while now.  They're doing and advocating for things that best aid the continued function of the denomination, even if they're going to make the far future more difficult.  Yes, its short sighted, but it's also about the only thing they can do without turning the whole thing into chaos.

It's a tough position to be in - just like the position of our Nazarene colleges and universities - stuck between an existential rock and hard place.  Offering grace and engaging publicly in conversations will create tears in the fabric and endanger the continued existence of Nazarene institutions.  That danger is real and scary.  I don't envy the people making those decisions.

At the same time, though, while this feeling of institutional retrenchment pervaded the weekend, I had conversation after conversation where pastors told me to keep pushing, keep asking questions, keep advocating for conversation and consideration.  Even those pastors who agree with the official denominational position understand the real complexities that exist in the practical living out of ideas in congregation and community and want to be free to talk about an issue that's long been a third rail.

From my perspective, it is an existential reality.  The only people I know who'd be comfortable with the human sexuality stance of the Church of the Nazarene are those currently participating in or who've been raised in conservative Christianity.  This group is growing smaller with every passing year.

I don't think we should change our position simply because its less popular.  If you know me, you know I gravitate towards unpopular ideas.  I go out of my way to find and embrace them.  I've changed my mind on the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ folks because of my study of scripture in an attempt to better defend the Nazarene position.

I've been converted by the Holy Spirit through the careful study of scripture.  I've been confirmed in my decision by working with a lot of really great, young pastors in my local congregation.  We've had a succession of queer pastors and pastoral students working in congregations in town.  Most of them have come from Baptist, Wesleyan, and Evangelical contexts where their ministry was not welcome.  They're some of the best example of holiness people I know - fervent in pursuit of the gospel and the Kingdom, willing to serve and learn and love like Jesus.

I still have great hope because the Church of the Nazarene continues to be full of similarly humble and committed servants - clergy and lay, young and old - committed to scriptural holiness and determined to live outrageously counter-cultural gospel lives in the world around them.  I know it's going to be a tricky process moving forward.  I don't know what the outcome will be, but I have great faith the God who has seen us this far will continue to lead and guide if we follow passionately and graciously.

I don't think the future is something to be feared, even if it requires difficult conversations.  Close relationships don't exist without tough and honest conversation.  I hope we continue to make space for them to take place - in our own homes, congregations, and lives, as well as in our communities, districts, and denominations.

Are We Too Dependent on Miracles?

This is a sermon I prepared for our weekly Refresh worship time this past week.  I felt very convicted by it and thought it could use a share. 

On the surface of it, this seems like a pretty straightforward miracle story – a reward for belief.  The prophet said the flour and oil would last and the widow trusted they would and they did.  But, as you hear it, is there anything that doesn’t sit well with you?  Any questions or problems that come up?

Maybe its just the time we live in, but I’m bothered by the power dynamics here.  Widows and children are the most vulnerable people in society.  This woman is ready to watch her son starve to death – she’s that desperate – and yet this random prophet shows up and asks her to bring him water, and she just does it.  The servant class is so baked into her, she’s ready to obey whatever this guy asks.

I have to ask myself, who is this guy to impose this upon her?  Yes, I get that God has orchestrated this whole thing, and he trusts that God will work it out, but it’s awfully mean, isn’t it?  I mean, I get the story and why it’s there, but I also wonder if we haven’t heard too many of these miracle stories.  I wonder if we haven’t become too dependent on the idea of miracles.

Think about it.  We use all the fossil fuels and minerals on our planet under the assumption that, by the time they run out, technology will have figured out a way to do what we need without them.  This is why climate change has lingered for so long – it wasn’t that people didn’t believe in it, but that they believed in a miracle more – that science would figure a way out of it that didn’t require sacrifice.

Our economy is built on debt – we encourage people to borrow.  These billionaires out there, they don’t have any actual cash – they just borrow against the value of their stocks, with the assumption that value always goes up, that there’s always more money out there.  It’s miracle thinking.

I was reading a lot, earlier this year, on Amazon’s hiring practices, because I guy I went to high school with ended up being a sort of whistle blower from the Amazon HR department.  They realized that people’s productivity goes down after a few years at a menial job, like stacking shelves or packing boxes, so they’ve set up their system to be really attractive at the beginning, but pretty terrible after three years.  They’ve designed their system to run through employees quickly and now they’ve run out of people.  They’ve burned out to many low wage workers, no one will do the job anymore.

Elijah didn’t worry about food, because God always provided for him – but that kind of put him in a position to impose on this poor widow, whose whole life has been nothing but suffering and imposition.  When we have this miracle mindset, it’s the people at the bottom of the pile who suffer – and in our society, we’re seeing some of this come home to roost.  We’ve got a lot of upheaval, because there are a lot of people who don’t see miracles.  They’re stuck with nothing and, like the widow, expect nothing.

When I worked at an urban youth center in Kansas City, during seminary, we’d always have volunteers (usually white, middle class, suburban) who’d wonder why these kids always had expensive sneakers and satellite TV, but they rarely had enough to eat.  There were complaints about their priorities.

I had to learn myself, and then teach them, that those priorities only make sense, when you plan to have a long term future.  If money or a job or a place to live could be gone tomorrow, you’re not thinking long term – you’re going to do what you can for yourself right now.  This is a different kind of miracle thinking – only a miracle will make this situation right, so I’m going to do what I can when I can.

Whether its a polluter tossing more coal into the furnace or an impoverished kid in line to buy Jordans, they’re both just banking on a miracle down the line.  For the rich, though, its an assumption “things will all work out;” while, for the poor, it’s a pipe dream, “we’ll gather a few sticks, make one last meal, and die.”  One assumes there will always be enough and the other is assuming there will never be enough.  Two sides of the same problem.

The gospel lesson here – where the Kingdom of God breaks in to the story – is that there is already enough.  It’s not about expecting the best or the worst of the future; it’s about believing that everything you need is already here.

Sometimes these biblical miracle stories make it seem like God is creating the problem God later intends to solve, right?  He asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, then provides a ram from the bushes.  He asks Elijah to take this woman’s last meal, only to give her more.  But that’s not what’s happening.  God is taking a common scenario from the world in which these people live, and changing the narrative.  Everybody in Abraham’s day sacrificed their firstborn to the gods; that was common practice.  God didn’t set up the scenario only to save the day; God radically changed the story.

Here it’s the same thing.  The prophet was a revered figure, someone with power.  It only made sense for him to take from those who couldn’t defend themselves.  That’s how society worked.  People who had things deserved them and people who didn’t have things didn’t deserve them.  The poor were just unworthy people.  Bad things only happened to bad people.  That was how society operated.

Here, God is changing the narrative.  Rich and poor.  Powerful and helpless.  Both are being served and fed and saved.  Both get the same meager meal of flour and oil, but both get to live.  It’s not about the miracle.  It’s not about God coming through in ways we couldn’t predict, it’s about God re-framing how we look at the world: there is already enough.  The flour will last, if we are responsible in its use!

We have to approach our world with this concept in mind.  It’s not about the future.  God has provided; we just have to be willing to share.  We have to be willing to be vulnerable, to make sacrifices.

Our society tells us there’s not enough.  That’s why we’re encouraged to consume.  Buy this TV now.  Limited time offer.  This deal won’t last forever.  You’re going to miss out!  How many people have more money than they’ll ever need saved up?  We feel like nobody, but the reality is very different.

Everybody thinks they’re middle class, because we’ve created this notion of scarcity.  We won’t raise taxes on people making under $250,000, because that’s “middle class,” but even $200,000 a year puts you in the top 10% of households in this country.  $10,000 a year is average for the whole world.

We have to figure out what it means to create a system, a society, where we can all live sustainably here and now.  For us, the rich – and everyone in this room is massively wealthy when measured on a global scale – it means being willing to sacrifice, do with less, and absolutely change our mindset.

Typically, those of us in power want gradual change.  We tell people who’ve been left out or oppressed, “wait your turn, go slow, we’ll get there eventually, let’s not shake things up too much” but that’s just more of the same miracle mindset.  Something in the future will change the situation so everyone can be equal with no one having to give up anything.  That’s not reality, though – that’s miracle thinking.

The poor in our society, the oppressed minorities, they live in a world where there’s no expectation things will get better or change in any meaningful way.  We have to be able to see the world with those eyes as easily as we can see with our privileged “it’ll all work out” eyes.  We shouldn’t need to depend on miracles for everyone to survive.                           

So, then, how do our lives need to change?