Reading about Christian anarchism

I'm writing this blog post in response to a tweet that reads, "I've been thinking about Christian anarchism what would you suggest I read? Something theological with good praxis". Sometimes the answer is longer than a tweet allows! @NormalSteve

If it's reading about Christian anarchism you're after, I'd recommend starting somewhere else. Start by reading about anarchism and then do your theological thinking from there. Then do some reading on Christian anarchism. 

Start with the classics: Colin Ward's "Anarchy in Action" (which I can't find on hive.co.uk but his more up to date "Talking Anarchy" is likely to be great. But you can get even more classic than that with Emma Goldman's "Anarchy and other Essays" and the essential Peter Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid". Oh yes: and William Morris! 

The original Christian anarchist writer would be Leo Tolstoi; his acerbic "What I Believe" and "The Kingdom of God is Within You" are the foundations of much Christian anarchist thought. 

Online much of the foundational stuff for Christian anarchism is available form Jacques Ellul and Vernard Eller. 

If you want something that gives you an incredibly in depth overview of Christian anarchist thought you can't go wrong with Alexandre Christoyannopoulos's "Christian Anarchism" and if you want something that's both practical and accessible you've got Dave Andrews' "Christi-anarchy" or "Not Religion, But Love". 

And, of course, anything by Dorothy Day but I would warmly recommend her inspiring biography, "The Long Loneliness" which tells the story of a pioneering Catholic Anarchist with honesty that leaves you utterly humbled. 

If you've read this far, I'm sure you won't mind me recommending my own "Seeking Justice: The Radical Compassion of Jesus" which takes principles of Christian anarchist theory, without the language of anarchism, and translates them into genuine experiments in radical compassion. 

Dalit theology and Christian anarchism

My new book is now available. There are links to where you can buy it from at the related blog here. It's RRP is £50 but I've seen it for as little as £37.50 already. 

This book is as much my journey into anarchism as anything and it's how I got started on Christian anarchist dialogue. I was writing a PhD on Dalit theology with a supervisor with expertise in postcolonialism and the Bible. The more I looked at Indian liberation theology the more two important questions presented: Why has liberation theology stalled? What is a western response to all these theologies from the margins?

As a white, western, privileged man I found most of my answers to these to questions in the radical theology of the anarchists and the historic peace Churches.

I think it's a unique contribution but I hope it's a helpful one.

Celebrating with the Martyrs: Cavanaugh's reflection on Romero's theology

Celebrating with the Martyrs: Cavanaugh's reflection on Romero's theology

By Keith Hebden

In Dying for the Eucharist or being killed by it? Romero's Challenge to the First-World Christians, (Note)Cavanaugh uses the theology and praxis of two of San Salvador's priest-martyr's, Oscar Romero and Rutilio Grande, to update St Paul's challenge to the Church not to eat and drink to condemnation (1 Cor. 11: 29 – 30) but rather carry the in the body the death of Jesus (2 Cor. 4: 10). (p. 177 – 178)

William T. Cavanaugh, a radical theologian based in the USA takes inspiration from Oscar Romero. Romero was made Archbishop and was expected to be a quiet, conservative pastor of the Church, unlikely to rock the boat. However, a week after his consecration a fellow priest and friend, Rutilio Grande was assassinated on his way to celebrate the mass in El Paisnal. Grande was an outspoken critique of his countries elites on behalf of landless peasants. Romero made the connection and as a prophetic act of defiance cancelled all the celebrations in the Archdiocese in favour of a Requiem for Grande at the Cathedral.

Romero intended the one Eucharist to be an anticipation of the kingdom, of the day when rich and poor would feast together, of the day when the body of Christ would not be wounded by divisions. (185)

Romero came under intense pressure from the elites who wanted no such "anticipation" but refused to acquiesce becoming for the first time a public prophetic voice and bringing the theologian of martyrdom back into the consciousness of the church.

Eventually Oscar Romero was assassinated – but not silenced – for his outspoken theology. He was shot while presiding at the Eucharist. For Cavanaugh, Romero's life, martyrdom, and teaching highlight the difference between dying for the Eucharist and being killed by it. One does the latter when eating the Eucharist without being in solidarity for others who share in the one cup but unequally so. Cavanaugh's energies in this paper are on illustrating the former. This means the article makes for a constructive read.

Cavanaugh's Christian theology of martyrdom finds its prototype in the execution of Jesus: "Christ triumphs by dying ignominiously, tortured to death on a cross, then peaceably rising again to new life." (178) So for the church father's, like Athanasius, the continuing tradition of martyrdom is not a failure of the political expansion of the kingdom but proof of the victory of Christ. The martyrs "bring a foretaste of the kingdom," by living and willingly facing of death as though "death does not finally exist." (179) Cavanaugh points out that the persuasive nature of public martyrdom is often cleverly undermined by those regimes who by means of secrecy and propaganda re-cast martyrs terrorists or delinquents. But this is where Cavanaugh moves the reader on to a more radical understanding of martyrdom than popular religion often allows. Martyrdom cannot be "the cult of heroic individuals" but rather the sacrificial act that sustains the body of Christ. (181)

What brought repression to a fever pitch in El Salvador in the 1970s and 80s was not merely the actions of heroic individuals but the efforts of the people to organize into bodies of a social nature: peasant cooperatives, base ecclesial communities, unions, student movements, and women's groups – many of them sponsored by the church and all of them a threat to the atomization of the poor that had traditionally worked so well for El Salvador's landed elite. The repression was meant to disappear, not merely individual bodies, but especially social bodies, largely through the spread of fear. To participate in any kind of social body meant confronting the very real possibility of one's own death. (181)

So it is the witness of the church to the efficacy of the death of the individual that makes her or him a martyr. Implicit in this, because of Jesus' model of martyrdom, is the ability of the martyr to resist violence with nonviolence. Anyone who resists martyrdom violently is not a martyr but someone overcome, tragically, by a greater violence than their own.

Cavanaugh brings to bear on this theology of martyrdom a theology of the Eucharist: that in sharing in the body of Christ we become that body and therefore partake in the sacrifice of God to us: a mutuality of grace. (182) But also that the Eucharist both draws the prototypical martyrdom into the present and the eschatological hope of the kingdom into the same present moment. In all of this he drawn on the theology of Augustine of Hippo, Roman Catholic teaching, and scriptural inference. (183 – 184)

The Letter to the Hebrews makes clear to the humble group of assembled Christians that their liturgical action is no mere earthly mumbling… At the Eucharist, the feast of the last day irrupts into earthly time, and the future breaks into the present. (184)

He poignantly notes that this eschatological element of the Eucharist is one easily forgotten by minority world Christians but not so by the persecuted Church. For Cavanaugh both the Eucharist and the martyrs participate in the sacrifice that makes builds and reveals a body of people. (186) They are signs and samples of the kingdom of God. But because, unlike Oscar Romero, we often sit down to the Eucharist without being in solidarity with the martyred Church we eat judgement upon ourselves.

This is not simply a matter of wishful thinking; our unity is true eschatologically, for we will all feast tighter in the kingdom. Where divisions exist now, in history, Christ in the Eucharist appears in judgement, according to Paul, and the judgement is severe…(186)

The Eucharistic feast penetrates through the nonsense of globalisations myth of world harmony; of "Thai villagers and Minnesotan suburbanites happily communing on the internet." (187) In the feast of the kingdom we are invited to properly discern the body and to give greatest honour to those considered least important. Romero shows us the way.

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William T. Cavanaugh, Dying for the Eucharist or being killed by it? Romero's Challenge to First-World Christians, Theology Today 58:2 (July 2001): 177–89.

Find Cavanaugh's original article and others by the same here and even more here.

Eucharist and Social Imagination: Understanding Cavanaugh

William T. Cavanaugh's Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Social Imagination in Early Modern Europe

by Keith Hebden

In Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Social Imagination in Early Modern Europe William Cavanaugh gives an overview of how the reformation debate on the nature of the Eucharistic sacrifice was formed as much politically as theologically. This fits with a broader theological method that Cavanaugh uses. Cavanaugh is much influenced by both the Radical Orthodox school and by Mennonite ecclesiology. So he draws on an orthodox understanding of Christian faith and on the Church fathers and mothers to reflect a radical understanding of Christian faith and worship.

Cavanaugh focuses on Luther's polemic against the Catholic Church in distilling a reformed theology of the eucharist. He notes that were one to rely on Luther's other polemic – against other reformers like Zwingli – a different emphasis would emerge but not a contradictory one. So for Luther the sacrament of bread and wine is a testament rather than a sacrifice because he sees the role of gift-giver as being exclusively with the God's agency. Humans respond in faith and should do prayer(1) and charity in relation to other people but cannot add or take away from God's initiative and complete role as gift-giver. Cavanaugh calls this a "zero-sum logic"; if God gives and we give back then there is an exchange rather than a gift and the grace of God is annulled. For Luther a human agency brings the sum back to zero instead of leaving us in eternal debt to God. (p. 587)

It is this logic of the market and exchange value that Cavanaugh focuses in on and identifies as modern: at odds with the medieval worldview. Helpfully, Cavanaugh describes what he sees as the relevant difference here between a medieval and a modern social system (accepting that there are blurring of these differences in the historical transition). For the medieval social imagination the primary illustration of society is of a human body. This body has different parts with different function; it is organic; hierarchical divinely ordained; held together by mutual obligation.(591) So the medieval mind begins with the social collective and sees how individuals must play their part: the hands must feed the stomach or they will suffer, even if they don't see the stomach's usefulness accept to eat the fruit of another's labour, and so on.

For the modern mind set, however, the point of departure is the abstracted free and private individual. Social relations between these individuals can be seen as either through a fair exchange of privately secured goods (the zero-sum) or through gift. (593) At this point Cavanaugh can't resist developing the theme of how this notion of the individual helped carry the moral development of the nation state to protect these now atomised individuals – no longer held in mutual, divinely appointed obligation – from killing each other.

But there is a problem with applying this zero-sum individualism to a theology of the Eucharistic sacrifice. And it is the problem that gift giving leaves an unbalanced maths:

Self-sacrifice in its modern mode preserves self-possession and precludes mutual participation because there must be an unreturned transfer from one discreet self to another. Self-sacrifice reinforces the boundaries between what is mine and what is thine – even if I give all – because it remains crucial that the absolute distinction between giver and recipient be maintained in order to identify self-sacrifices as such. Agape thereby appear to exclude eros, the desire of the giver to be with the recipient.(597)

The charitable act is problematic because it creates a power imbalance and is self-nullifying.

Cavanaugh is positive about Luther's intention to reform the corrupted practices of the Roman Catholic church in turning the work of offering the Eucharist into an opportunity in itself for an exchange to take place. In other words, the theology and practice was corrupt. However, he sees Luther's response as one that de-eschatologises the Eucharist and takes out human participation. (589)

For Cavanaugh, the patristic theology of anamnesis is key to re-thinking the Eucharist. Put simply, when the Eucharist is celebrated there is a collapsing of time, or rather the past event of Christ's sacrifice is drawn into the present moment of its celebration and the future hope of it's fulfilment is drawn forward into the now. With this theology it is possible to say that as the Priest and people celebrate the Eucharist they take part in God's sacrificial act – as they eat of Christ so they become the Body of Christ the very sacrifice they receive.

Cavanaugh uses the theology of Irenaeus and of Augustine to pull out a socio-theological response. For Irenaeus there can be "no distinction between our offering and Christ's offering in the Eucharist."(599) We are drawn into the divine life and our offering is made part of God's – neither deducting nor adding to it. For Augustine it is the sharing of the sacrifice with Christ that unites us with God. As Cavanaugh puts it: "In the sacrifice of the God-man, the zero-sum distance between divine agency and human agency is collapsed into the Body of Christ." (600) This solves the problem of unfair exchange because no distinction is made between giver and recipient and gift since all are part of the body of Christ in the work of the Eucharist.

Cavanaugh Concludes:

It may be possible after all, then, to embrace a conception of sacrifice which does not fall prey to the modern imagination of social exchange and its politics of oscillation between public self-interest and private philanthropy. At the same time, there is much in the patristic ideas of sacrifices that transcends the static hierarchical organicism of medieval Europe.(602)

What is radical about this orthodoxy is it's reliance upon the Eucharistic imagination to impact the social imagination. The Eucharist draws the Church into a new and realising eschatology of a society where all receive every gift and the gift of giving in every sacrifice made.

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"William T. Cavanugh," Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Social Imagination in Early Modern Europe," in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Duke University Press, 31: 3, Fall 2001, 589.

The full text of William Cavanaugh's paper can be found here and even more archived stuff here.

Who would Jesus shoot? - the sequel

Baptist minister, nonviolent educator and activist for Pace e Bene Australia Simon Moyle writes in the The Age :

The Australian Defence Force has swiftly removed biblical references from soldiers' gunsights manufactured by US company Trijicon. The gunsights, which some US Army commanders have dubbed ''spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ'', have scripture references stamped next to their serial numbers.
These revelations have once again raised questions over the connection between religion, particularly Christianity, and violence. As a Christian and a church leader I could not be more appalled at the distortion of Christianity these inscriptions represent. It seems timely then to make a solid defence of the non-violence of Christianity. As the great Indian independence leader, Mahatma Gandhi, said: ''Jesus Christ is the most perfect example of non-violence in history,'' and paused before adding, ''And the only people who don't realise this are Christians.''

Of course, there have been times throughout history when people have invoked the name of God or Jesus to justify their violence. However, this should not be confused with genuine Christianity, even when it is sanctioned by high ecclesial authorities.
The Christian church remained faithful to the non-violence of its founder for the first 300 years of its history, as even those in the military who converted refused to bear arms. It was only when Christianity became imposed by Emperor Constantine in the 4th century that Cicero's ''just war'' theory was adapted to justify Constantine's plundering.

Non-violence itself is often mistaken for passivity. This is a misnomer - one must be actively engaged in the struggle against violence and oppression to be non-violent. Non-violent people not only refuse to threaten, hurt or kill those who oppose them, but they actively engage the other's humanity, seeking their opponent's transformation as well as their own and those they defend. This is what the church was intended to be - a non-violent army transforming the world not with a gun, but with active love.
However, non-violent action sometimes raise tensions or causes disruption to the status quo, as Jesus frequently demonstrates. While he overturns the tables in the temple and drives out the sheep and cattle (saving them from being sacrificed), he never hurts anyone. But he is absolutely not passive.
His teachings also consistently bear this out. ''Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,'' Jesus taught. ''Put down your sword; those who live by the sword die by the sword.'' One wonders what might have been had Trijicon's gunsights been inscribed with these verses.

Even Jesus' teaching on ''turning the other cheek'' has been misunderstood. As biblical scholar Walter Wink shows, this command is actually creative non-violence at work. ''If someone strikes you on the right cheek,'' Jesus says, ''turn the other also.'' With the left or ''unclean'' hand unavailable to a 1st century Jew for anything other than toilet use, one person striking another on the right cheek could only mean giving a backhanded slap. Such a blow is symbolic - in a hierarchical system it is intended to maintain domination over a social subordinate. But Jesus' advice is clear - if someone attempts to treat you as less than an equal, turn the other cheek. By so doing, you invite them to strike a blow with a fist - a blow only inflicted between equals - or to back down altogether.

But the heart of Christianity's non-violence is the death and resurrection of Jesus. Refusing to defend himself with violence when his accusers come to arrest him, Jesus goes so far as forgiving those who kill him. But for Christians it's the resurrection that drives the commitment to non-violence - not only does it vindicate Jesus' non-violent way, but it proves that even death is no barrier to God.

Of course, faith in the resurrection (or any religion for that matter!) is in short supply these days, but it is not required for non-violent movements to succeed. This way of accepting suffering rather than meting it out has seen non-violent movements all over the world win justice for their people: from the US civil rights movement, to people power in the Philippines, the colour revolutions in Eastern Europe to the Norwegian and Bulgarian resistance to Nazism.

It remains clear that those who claim to follow Jesus cannot do so while ignoring his commands, let alone the way he lived. As my friend Jarrod often says, ''killing for Jesus makes about as much sense as shagging for celibacy.''

The final sentence sounds familiar - was it not about fighting for peace etcetera? The author is puzzled about the consistent changing of the spelling nonviolence into non-violence in the above.

We wrote about this earlier.

World News by Dallas Darling

Probably some people will - even angrily - disagree, but operettas generally have silly story lines. And what happened at a certain plane landing in Detroit MI at Christmas looks a lot like an operetta.
But consequences for the foolish young man from Nigeria and particularly for people in Yemen will not be silly at all. (Of course, there is no connection between the failed attempt to blow up a plane and the earlier military attack by the US at Yemen, how dare you even think of that!)

In the menu of indispensable Antiwar.com my attention was drawn to an article with the title Still Trying to Monopolize the Arabian Peninsula which promises to give a historical perspective to this operetta.
It does. The author has the - to me - intriguing name of Dallas Darling. It turns out that the author has written a book called The other side of Christianaity the description of which sounds a lot like what I consider to be not the other but the appropriate side of Christianity.

Daily reflections on the news by Dallas Darling can be found on a site intriguingly called Beverly Darling. No, they are not one person, I think.

The year ain't over 'til it's over and it is never too late to make a discovery in a certain year.
See what you can conclude about Dallas Darling's position. (My preliminary idea: not an anarchist so not a Christian anarchist either but not far from the Kingdom anyway).

The photo illustrates Yemen as the Afghanistan of the Arabian peninsula, another worthy recipient of bombs from unmanned planes, or manned planes flying at 30.000 feet for that matter. Here I have written about it in Dutch.