500 Years of Martin Luther

Today many of my theologian and Christian friends are posting thoughts and quotes about Martin Luther since the Reformation officially began on this day, according to church historians, five hundred years ago when Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle.  Now I'm no Luther expert, but I have found some of his ideas really intriguing and I continue to wrestle with the implications of what he came to believe and teach.  

Two short quotes of Luther have proved to be a guiding light for me this year as I deal with the fallout from my divorce and the unending waves of grief I feel day after day:

1) "Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong ("sin boldly"), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world."  

When I hear these words I am only able to "hear" them as a child of the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition.  Wesley, when he encountered the work of Luther, found it to be deeply disturbing and too mystical.  In fact, he found the idea so completely confusing as to arouse anger.  In 1781 Wesley described Luther's work as "shallow … muddy and confused … deeply tinctured with mysticism throughout, and hence often dangerously wrong."  How can a true Christian sin boldly, Wesley reasoned?  Doesn't such an idea lead into the darkness of anti-nomianism and anarchy?  I think Wesley never fully resolved some of these tensions in his own mind because, after all, his conversion experience took place while hearing Luther's reflections on St. Paul's Letter to the Romans.  What can possibly be more Protestant than that kind of a conversion!?!

Yet the good news behind what Luther is writing beckons to me too.  It's like a faint glimmer of hope that God is so profoundly big and good and in utter control of history that our own human free will almost seems to fade in importance.  Sure, we do bad things and we do them all the time and these harmful choices we make hurt others around us and even hurt ourselves.  Yet what if the mystics are correct when they insist that God is love and that love wins and that in some very mysterious way that we don't yet fully understand we will -- all of us, according to some! -- come to rest within the arms of a loving God who is far bigger than we can even think or imagine?  Such is the logic of grace.  It is the logic behind old hymns that I grew up singing in camp-meeting tabernacles with words like "Jesus paid it all / All to Him I owe / Sin had left a guilty stain / He washed it white as snow." In other words, salvation is a work of God and not something we ever earn.  As a dysfunctional Wesleyan, I find that very, very hard to believe for any serious length of time.  

The doubting Thomas in me cries out, "But how can God use addiction?" I've wrestled with this theologically for at least fifteen years:  can God really love an addict?  After all, I can hear Wesley saying, "a child of God does not sin."  And what is addiction if not utter slavery to sin and self? (Some would say it is a brain disorder, but I'm not completely sold on that idea yet).  So, anyway, that's why I am intrigued by Luther's doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone, yet am not entirely sure if I can believe it.

2) The second quote from Luther that has been with me all year was posted by my friend Ken Brewer at Spring Arbor University:  “One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.”  

Of course, I find tremendous hope in this idea because it means that even a story as seemingly tragic as my own can be redeemed.  All of my life I have longed to be a theologian.  It has bordered at times on an obsessive-compulsive tendency, as the history of this blog demonstrates.  Try as I might, I have simply not been able to understand my recent divorce and my bouts with addiction.  In many moments my uncertainty has led me into profound despair of life itself and, as I have written elsewhere, throughout this year I have often asked myself the perennial human question: "To be or not to be?"  

Yet what an irony it would be if this path in life that I have taken (did I chose it or not?  I cannot decide) could be redeemed in such a way that through the suffering and damnation I am currently experiencing I might one day come to a better understanding of God.  God, after all, has always been my Ultimate Concern, even when I haven't always acted like it.  Indeed, I think this may have been the fundamental problem with my marriage:  I allowed Courtney to replace God in my life and, when she inevitably let me down as all humans must do, then I grew resentful and angry.  Even now I often feel the temptation to give in to bitterness, yet I know that to do so would be to walk a path toward destruction and death.  I hear St. Paul whispering in my ear, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."  I'm not always sure what that means, but I want to do my best to follow in that Way.

Christian thinkers and mystics since Pseudo-Dionysius have pointed to a three-fold spiritual path for believers: a trail that leads from purgation through illumination to unification.  Luther's statement above echoes this ancient teaching about purgation.  We must be refined in a furnace of pain for, otherwise, some of us would simply never learn and we would be condemned to a hell of our own making for eternity.  This is a deep mystery:  even Jesus Christ had to enter into death and damnation.  Regardless of whether or not one takes it literally, the church has also always taught that Jesus Christ descended into hell itself prior to his resurrection by the Father.  

At this point in my life that idea brings me deep existential comfort.  It isn't just a "head knowledge," but a "heart reality."  When I can do nothing at all except to pray Psalm 6 or Psalm 77, even in the midst of the agony and tears I cling to this insane Christian idea that God herself/himself is present with us in the pain.  Thus we are called, as my uncle once told me, not to "go around" the pain, but to go "through" it.  I don't really pretend to understand what that means, but it seems wise.  

--

God Almighty, thank you for the slightly insane, profane, racist bigot Martin Luther because if you can save a dude like that, you can probably save anyone.  That's the offensiveness of grace.  I believe, but help now my unbelief.  Amen.

Coates on Coates: A Book Review of Between the World and Me

Hailed as one of the best books of 2015 and winner of the National Book Award, critics continue to heap approbations on the newest work of the critical race theorist and emerging black intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Written in the form of a letter to his fifteen year old son, Coates writes about what life in a black body is like in a world build upon the systematic enslavement and destruction of black bodies.  Though we are allowed to overhear this conversation between one black man and his son, it is clear that the real audience for this book is the white "race," a people Coates constantly refers to as "the Dreamers" due to their singularly undivided focus on attaining the American Dream -- an edifice that they have constructed by means of oppressing and (ab)using black bodies.  What is the Dream? "It is perfect houses with nice lawns.  It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways.  The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts.  The Dream smells like peppermint and tastes like strawberry shortcake."  And, try as he might to attain the Dream, it remains ever inaccessible to his people because "the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies" (11).

Though deeply cynical and acerbic in its tone, Coates does powerfully communicate to the white reader many sharp insights into life and struggles of black women and men.  Coates exposes the ways in which large-scale systems -- legal policies, city districting and policing, cultural attitudes, and so on -- operate to disadvantage those with black skin.  Particularly insightful is Coates' recurring argument that the enslavement of black bodies was and is a profoundly physical act, not some abstract idea.  Racism destroys particular people with particular experiences, preferences, and characteristics.  This racism "is a visceral experience... it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscles, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth" (10).  The insidious ideology of white supremacy possesses a foul taste, a rancid smell, and leaves dead bodies in its wake.  If Coates' highly emotive language feels like a punch in the gut, it does so for good reason.

Regrettably, Coates structures his argument in such a way that a white man like myself is denied permission to voice any disagreement lest I be charged with the crime of "privilege" or even "racism." (Nevermind the fact that as a black man Coates seems to know precisely what is going on in the white mind).  And though I plead guilty to the former, recognizing the way my social status has shaped my own perception of the world around me, I want to resist the latter label.  Likewise I reject the tendency ubiquitous among both the far left and the far right to deny certain people the right to dissent, to express reasoned disagreement, and to subject every idea to rigorous scrutiny.  If we cannot dialogue, after all, what hope do we have to arrive at even a modicum of understanding?  Yet this, it seems, is precisely what Coates considers to be impossible.  Rooted dogmatically in the Nietzschean ethic of "will to power," the author's arguments throughout the book assume that relations between whites and blacks must ever remain marked by struggle, conflict, and even violence.  Assuming that white people can change, that they might one day be anything other oppressors, that they will stop plundering black bodies for their own personal economic gain, Coates tells his son, is harmful idealism that distracts from the pragmatic, ongoing project of the struggle for black power.  In this world, one either eats or gets eaten.  And the Dreamers have been feasting on black flesh for far too long.

Given his rejection of theism and the uniquely Christian hope that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, it should not surprise us that Coates offers no suggestions for a way forward other than armed popular resistance.  Trashed as idealistic gas is the pacifism of Martin Luther King; in its place Coates seeks to revive the militant tactics of the Black Power Movement and the violent rhetoric of his hero Malcolm X ("If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.  He would not turn the other cheek for you.  He would not be a better man for you.  He would not be your morality") 36.  For this reason, Coates denigrates those heroes of "Black History Month" who staged sit-ins, marched for freedom, and "seemed to love the worst things in life -- love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets" (32).  Nonviolent methods are lauded by whites because pacifism poses no genuine threat to white power, Coates cynically argues.  It is an oppressor's morality.  Besides, any willingness to suffer or die nonviolently for a cause depends upon the conviction that history is aiming at a particular end or telos.  Yet that is not the world we inhabit, according to the author.  Ridiculing those who believe that the meek will inherit the earth, Coates inhabits a universe that is purely "physical, and its moral arc [is] bent toward chaos then concluded in a box" (28).

As a Christian and a theologian, I must part ways with Ta-Nehisi Coates at this juncture.  Though he has much to teach me about endemic racism, the social and physical conditions of urban poverty, the black diaspora, the shortcomings of the white Dream, and much more, I must (at the risk of being discarded as another privileged white oppressor) declare my belief in the possibility of reconciliation and transformation.  Christ's prayer for those who crucified him remind us today that the cycle of violence -- long though it may have lasted -- can grind to a halt through the power of forgiveness.  History is not condemned to be, as Coates believes, one long game of "king of the mountain" in which whites stand on top of the pile, shoving down black and brown pretenders to their throne.  In contrast to all of this stands the kenotic movement celebrated by Paul in Philippians 2, the master who washes his servants' feet, the black baptist preacher who instructs his followers to overcome hatred with love.

For though Coates' vitriol positively drips with righteous indignation, he never offers to me a convincing reason why I ought to share his outrage at injustice.  For if the world we inhabit really is mere chaos that ends in a box, for what reason might I consider surrendering my status as a white male?  If that's the game we're playing, then I will do what I will do, compelling others to serve my own purposes and making no apologies for doing so.  Coates either overlooks the danger of the oppressed becoming the oppressor or else he tacitly approves of it.  And it is this great struggle which provides Coates and his son with meaning and purpose in their lives.  In perhaps the most honest moment in this letter, the author states the conclusion that he is compelled to embrace: "Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about this world is meant to be... These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope" (71).  This is a profoundly dark and cynical perspective from which to advocate for "racial justice," one which effectively renders terms like "good," "true," "beautiful," and "just" devoid of any meaning beyond the personal and subjective.  And so I have every right to reject the author's idea of justice just as much as I might claim to dislike tomatoes.  Who is he to argue with me?  On what grounds will he convince me otherwise?

Thankfully, I believe in the God of Justice and Peace who provides content and definition to such ideas, enfleshed in his very body hung on a cross and resurrected.  Just as guns will one day be reforged into garden tools and just as the lion will one day lay down with the lamb, so too I cling to the hope that "one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls" and we will know peace.  This was Dr. King's dream.  One day we will all wake up to find that this reconciliation is the fabric with which this universe was woven all along.

Russ

He struck me as unusually clean-shaven and well-kept to be sitting week after week in our Monday food pantry. Upon introducing myself, I met a friendly, educated, and articulate young man probably in his late thirties or early forties. Not only does he speak well and appear to be responsible, Russ* is also white -- which made me all the more curious as to why he sat in this food pantry which typically attracts the uneducated and the disenfranchised minority peoples who are unable to thrive in our racist society.

Russ, it turns out, has a story. As we all do. He was abandoned as a baby and brought up in a state institution for most of his childhood. In his early teens, he found some foster parents who took him in and cared for him, but "we didn't always see eye to eye," Russ adds. Immediately after finishing high school, Russ found a decent job and eventually became the co-manager of his organization. But then Russ found Vicodin.

Vicodin was for Russ more appealing and addictive than any substance he'd ever come across before (and he had tried many). He told me, "I don't know why, but Vicodin just makes me feel happy. Alcohol never really did that for me like it does for some people, but Vicodin does. When I started to get sad and depressed, I would just take some and then I'd be okay. It became my best friend." Perhaps because of his feelings of abandonment having grown up as an orphan or perhaps because he just wanted to escape his depression, Russ started buying Vicodin off of the street for $3-a-pop. Eventually his habit grew completely out of control and he was taking up to 25 or more each day.

At first, it wasn't a problem. Russ could balance his work with his addiction and could manage well in both worlds. "It isn't like alcohol," he said, "you can smell it on the breath of someone who is drunk, but the one who's high on pills appears completely normal." But then the economy went south and his business folded. His one and only friend -- the other co-manager of his business -- became very depressed and blew off his head with a shotgun one night after they'd had a pleasant dinner together.

Russ turned to his old friend again for comfort. Without an income, soon he had to take out a second mortgage on his house, sell his big screen TV and his new car, and cut back on groceries in order to maintain his pill habit. But a year after this, Russ found himself evicted from his home and penniless. Desperate to find shelter, he came upon a group of Latinos who took him in and let him stay in one of their closets. Russ doesn't know Spanish and none of his housemates know English, but they've managed to work out a suitable arrangement: the Latinos let Russ sleep in their closet and, in return, Russ gives them all of his food stamps every month.

Which is why Russ comes to our food pantry. Without us, he would have nothing to eat.

I asked him, "So what do you do all day?" and he laughed, "I dunno. Watch TV. I give plasma twice a week and get 25 bucks each time. But I don't really do anything else." "And you're satisfied with that?" "I guess so. There ain't any jobs in this neighborhood and I ain't got a car. Besides, even if I got a job, I'd just spend all my money on Vicodin."

"So once you lost your job and your house, you had to cut back on your drug habit, right? What was that like?"

"Oh it was awful. I don't even want to talk about it. I just curled up on the floor for days all by myself, sweating from head to toe, passing out and going into seizures. I can't believe I'm still alive."

"Why didn't you call an ambulance and go to the hospital?"

"Well, I don't have any insurance and I don't have any money. I didn't want to go into debt for a trip to the ER."

"Do you still take Vicodin?"

"Yes. Whenever I get the money to, I buy some. Somedays I don't get to get any... like today (which is why I'm fidgety and scratching myself all the time). But usually I like to try to get at least three Vicodin a day to make myself feel better."

"Why do you take these things? I mean, they have ruined your life."

"Yep. They are my worst enemy, but they're also my best friend. When I have them, they make me happy and they are my best friend. When I run out, they turn on me and make me miserable. I guess they are a demon dressed up like a friend."

"So if you realize that, don't you want to get off of them?"

"No. Not really. I like them. I don't want to quit. They're the only things that make me happy and make me want to keep living."

"Have you ever thought of going into rehab?"

"My adoptive parents want me to do that, but I don't want to. You can't force someone to do rehab that doesn't want to go."

"Right. But are you happy living in a closet and giving away your food stamps and living like this?"

"No, but I can't get out of it. I'm stuck. So I guess I should just make the best of it and deal with it. I mean, I know I can't quit the Vicodin so why try, ya know?"

I sat there in silence for a long time, not sure what to say. I wanted to tell him that I could help him to get well, but here was a man who didn't want to get well. I thought of Jesus words in John chapter 5 to the invalid at the pool: "Do you want to be made well?" Here's a man who would look Jesus in the eye and say, "No. Go away." So what does Jesus do in that case?

I don't judge Russ. I mean, if I had no family and no friends and was raised as an orphan in an institution, I might be just the same. I might be willing to trade in my life for a few moments of happiness... a few hours of feeling like there's nothing wrong with the world. Like Russ told me: "For about 5 or 6 hours after popping some Vicodin nothing bothers you anymore. People can say mean things to you that would normally hurt, but they don't hurt. You just don't feel anything bad at all. You're just happy for a little while. Then it all crashes down later."

So I'll see Russ next Monday. Nothing will have changed. He'll still be sleeping in a closet and paying his rent with his food stamps. I'll still be a pastor trying to help people out of hell. And I'll sit down and ask Russ how his week was and he'll say the same thing he says every time I see him: "It's a tough world out there."

You're right, Russ. It is a tough world out there.

*Russ is not his real name, but I'm ashamed to admit that for a long time I thought his name was Russ until he corrected me a few weeks ago. God forgive me.