First Gentleness, Then Severity

FIRST GENTLENESS, THEN SEVERITY

By Marc Batko



In “Kasper Hauser”, Jacob Wasserman tells a story that suggests the life-giving power of Christian faith and Christian hope. A land was long the victim of a drought. Its wells dried up and people grew angry with one another. The helplessness increased until a little boy came and played so beautifully on his flute that water rose again in the wells.

St. Francis, Luther and Kierkegaard are antidotes to comfortable Christianity, to Christianity without scandal, passion, paradox and decision.

St. Francis (1183-1226) often described as the mirror of Christ preached to the birds: “How thankful you should be to the loving Creator for your wings and your feathers, your freedom and your security!” The birds listened and flew away in the sign of the cross. Poverty, simplicity, renunciation on possessions, union with the mystical Christ and the Canticle to the Sun are St. Francis’ legacy to us.

Martin Luther, who translated the Bible into German, preached 3 times a week and wrote 50 volumes of biblical interpretation, systematic theology and table talk, was transformed upon reading in Romans 1,17 “The just shall live by faith.” Works righteousness and the papal church, the Babylonian captivity of the church, stood in the way of justification by faith alone.

Freedom of the will was threatened by bondage of the will as the word of God
Always grapples with speculation, sophism and human wisdom. Paul’s letter to the Romans is a clarion call to freedom and a rejection of fear.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a prolific author and Christian thinker intent on introducing Christianity into the Christendom of Denmark. He described faith in a living, personal, infinite and transcendent God as a leap across 70,000 fathoms of water, believing against understanding. The incarnation of Christ, the immersion of the eternal in the temporal, calls us to lives of paradox and passion, sacrifice and personal response.

For Kierkegaard, critical radical Christianity was threatened by speculative philosophy that annulled the decision and responsibility of the individual called to discipleship and contemporaneousness with Christ. In the speculative Hegelian system, the individual disappears and the authority of personal conscience is annulled. The second great threat was reducing life to pure aestheticism or sense perception. The third threat was childish or comfortable Christianity where faith is replaced by the baptismal certificate.

In Kierkegaard’s time, Christianity was confused with philosophical idealism, the eternal with time and God with man. Kierkegaard lived life in seriousness, enamored of the grace, goodness and power of God and called people to the instant. First gentleness and then severity was his method. Crucifixion of the will and freedom from the herd are essential. If God is our sufficiency and foundation, the ego is a false foundation or idolatry (cf. James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard, 1865).

Crisis theologians learned from Kierkegaard and distinguish Kairos time from everyday time. Kairos time is decision time where individuals and institutions are called to new life in faith in God and humility. The gospel is the transvaluation of values. The incarnation radically challenges conventional ideas of strength, health, power and personal fulfillment.

Misunderstandings like prejudices are first steps to understanding. The event of understanding or the fusion of horizons (cf. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1975) is enlightenment and a new beginning, the storming of the inner Bastille. Faith is more suffusion with new power than escape from the world. Faith is more interruption than custom. Faith is more about devotion and love than emotion.

For Kierkegaard, God is liberation and balance. Attempting life without God leads only to despair, to self-encapsulation, captivity to self-righteousness and self-importance.

Following the fellow-suffering and fellow-quarreling God, searching for the narrow way and life in abundance, the disciple is not above the master and cannot avoid suffering and the hostility of the world.

Judge for yourselves, thoughts that wound from behind and Christ as the pattern were three keywords for Kierkegaard in inviting people to the paradox and scandal of the eternal in time. Faith is personal but not private. The truth of the incarnation is reserved for the eyes of faith.

Jesus spoke in the indicative, not the imperative: “You cannot serve two masters”, not you should not serve two masters, God and mammon. The early church saw wealth and militarism as the most deadly threats to discipleship.

The gospel is the transvaluation of all values. Humility, nonviolence, sacrifice and personal response are now the new priorities in following the God of unconditional love. The idolatries of greed, materialism, selfishness and violence are overthrown when disciples obey God more than man and live a new language and a new mathematics challenging the myths and rationalizations of market fundamentalism.

The Old Testament prophets did not foretell the future but warned that present injustice and inequality would bring ruin. Amos criticized the powerful of his day for being unable to tell their left hand from their right hand. The inside of the cup must be cleansed, Jesus proclaimed, not only the outside.

The messianic vision has had vast power over centuries to motivate people for justice and equality. Isaiah described the messianic time saying that the lion and the lamb would lie down together, a child would lead them and nations would not learn war any more.

Paul was a new age prophet who spoke to our future from his present. “There is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free in Christ.” The gospel which is a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Greeks is for believers the power of God unto salvation.

“Status confessionis” is the state where the gospel and the life of faith are threatened. Hitler demanded worship and submission in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. A Reich-church bishop was appointed, Bodelschwingl, who was only interested in making the church captive to the Fuhrer. In its 1934 Barmen Confession, the underground Confessing Church in Germany proclaimed that Jesus was the one word that we must hear and obey in life and death and that all principalities and powers claiming absolute power were relativized and annulled.

In South Africa, apartheid was recognized as a massive threat to the Christian faith by the South African Council of Churches. The God who sends rain on the just and unjust and makes his sun rise on the good and the evil is mocked when rights and human dignity are reserved to one class and withheld from another class. In the 1970s, the Reformed World Alliance of churches in Debrecen, Hungary denounced the total and absolute rule of the market under neoliberalism as a status confessionis.

Work cannot define us since we are always more than what we do or achieve. The person is not a thing or a clock but a process. “For freedom, Christ has set you free”, Paul proclaims. You are not your own but are Christ’s. Christ is our wisdom and righteousness, redemption and sanctification. As pro-visional creatures, we are called to live in double vision, in universal and particular history. As branches of one vine, we are interdependent sharing our stories and listening to the stories of others.

The prophets confronted people with the decision: Ruin or abandonment of idols. Kairos time replaced everyday time. Faith in God, contemporaneousness with Christ and the imperatives of justice, equality and nonviolence call us to radical discipleship that sets people over profits and being over having.

Hyper-individualism, nonstop consumerism, the warrior mentality and glorification of violence (cf. Walter Winks, The Powers that Be, 1998) are challenges to Christian discipleship. Isn’t our task similar to Kierkegaard’s project, to introduce Christianity into comfortable Christendom, to show by faith in God and humility that Christianity turns the world upside down?

The reign of God is like a merchant who upon finding the pearl of great price went and sold everything he had. Soren Kierkegaard expected sacrifice and personal response from believers living lives of seriousness in the instant.

Jesus is the kingdom of God in person (autobasileia) and the truth of God in person (autoaletheia) who calls us to different values, priorities and goals. In itself the market is a steamroller, a mechanism of marginalization and exclusion that pretends to be a self-healing natural law. Rights and visions are buried under the market logic of profit. Under the reign of Christ, the market would be humanized. As the Sabbath was meant to serve people, the economy was intended to serve humankind.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The greatest became the least. Eternity or eternal life became possible through contemporaneousness with Christ.

God is liberation and balance. The God who calls to exodus and sustains with manna in the wilderness is knowable and addressable, “total help for total need” (Karl Barth). Encapsulation in the self, the self curved in itself (Martin Luther), is the alternative to faith in the personal, loving, infinite and transcendent God. This alternative leads only to self-righteousness and despair, confusion of God and humankind, the eternal and the temporal, speculative philosophy and the Christian faith. Unbelief is reflected in confusion of means and ends, part and whole and private and public. Hyper-individualism and turbo-materialism allow public spirit to atrophy or fall by the wayside.

In the North and the South, the market panacea of export orientation, privatization, deregulation and liberalized markets leads to absolute disaster. The rampant inequality, growing poverty, commodification of nature and destruction of natural resources are products of economic myths setting financiers and investors above workers and consumers. Behold what devastations are caused by the unbridled market, self-righteousness and immunization from criticism!

Vulgar materialism, social Darwinism, solipsism and the worship of technology can be renounced as dysfunctional, ahistorical and self-destructive. Living on borrowed time and holy ground, and solid rock, let us live as salt, leaven and light, heralds of a solidarian future in a sociopathic present. Supported and encouraged by many resistance traditions, let us be advocates of growth retraction, of autonomous and economical alternatives for the North and the South. Let us be persons of hope amid the disappointments of corrupt politics, economics and spirituality. Let us take the future of the world in our hands!