Asked about motivations, one used the term nafeer, which refers to “communal labor” or “communal work.” Another mentioned takiya, when “people collect their food together and to eat together, to share it, if somebody doesn’t have food for supper or dinner.” While traveling in Sudan during Ramadan, I saw many instances of men far from home—drivers, workers, or indeed our translators—joining the communal prayers and meals served on the street when the fast is broken at sundown.
It’s easy, from a great distance, to be cynical about or dismissive of the prospects for good government in Sudan, but these are the same kinds of traditions that have become the foundation for more democratic, less violent political systems in other places. Nafeer reminded me of toloka, an old Slavic word I heard used to explain the roots of the volunteer movement in Ukraine. Takiya sounds like the community barn-raisings of 19th-century rural America. The communal activists who draw on these old ideas do so not because of a foreign influence campaign, or because they have read John Locke or James Madison, or because, like the inhabitants of medieval Europe, they want to turn the clock back to a different era. They do so because their experience with autocracy, violence, and nihilism pushes them to want democracy, civilian government, and a system of power-sharing that would include all the people and all the tribes of Sudan.
On both of my trips to Sudan, I traveled out via Dubai, and each time it felt like a scene from a children’s book, where one of the characters walks through a mirror or a wardrobe and emerges in a completely different universe. In Sudan, some people have nothing except a bowl of bean soup once a day. In the Dubai airport, the Chanel store is open all night, AirPods can be purchased for the flight home, and multiple juice bars serve crushed tropical fruits.
But despite the illusion of separation, those universes are connected, and the same forces that have destroyed Sudan are coming for other countries too. Violence inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders has already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond. Greed, nihilism, and transactionalism are reshaping the politics of the rich world too. As old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new structure. They are replaced by nothing.
vulgar spiritualism
Karl Barth, speaking to a trade union in Safenwil, December 17th, 1911:
Everything now seems to be crystal clear, yet perhaps nowhere else has Christianity fallen farther away from the spirit of her Lord and Master than precisely in this estimation of the relation between spirit and matter, inner and outer, heaven and earth. One might well say that for eighteen hundred years the Christian church, when confronted by social misery, has always referred to the Spirit, to the inner life, to heaven. The church has preached, instructed, and consoled, but she has not helped. Indeed, in the face of social misery she has always commended help as a good work of Christian love, but she has not dared to say that help is the good work. She has not said that social misery ought not to be in order then to summon all her power for the sake of this conviction that it ought not to be. She has entrenched herself behind a falsely understood saying of Jesus, taken out of context, which says that “the poor you always have with you” (John 12:8). She has accepted social misery as an accomplished fact in order to talk about the Spirit, to cultivate the inner life, and to prepare candidates for the kingdom of heaven. That is the great, momentous apostasy of the Christian church, her apostasy from Christ. When social democracy then appeared with its gospel of heaven on earth, this very church dared to stand in judgment over it, because it had denied the Spirit. She referred with smug horror to the little verse about angels and sparrows, and to similar expressions. She accused social democracy of vulgar materialism, and beat upon her breast: “Lord, we thank you that we are not as they are, that we are still idealists who regard spirit as the highest value and believe in heaven.” Thus spoke and wrote the pastors—who would then sit down and eat a hearty midday meal!
no shortage of justifying theories
11. A concrete commitment to the poor must also be accompanied by a change in mentality that can have an impact at the cultural level. In fact, the illusion of happiness derived from a comfortable life pushes many people towards a vision of life centered on the accumulation of wealth and social success at all costs, even at the expense of others and by taking advantage of unjust social ideals and political-economic systems that favor the strongest. Thus, in a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people. This means that a culture still persists — sometimes well disguised — that discards others without even realizing it and tolerates with indifference that millions of people die of hunger or survive in conditions unfit for human beings. A few years ago, the photo of a lifeless child lying on a Mediterranean beach caused an uproar; unfortunately, apart from some momentary outcry, similar events are becoming increasingly irrelevant and seen as marginal news items.
80. We must also recognize that, throughout centuries of Christian history, helping the poor and advocating for their rights has not only involved individuals, families, institutions, or religious communities. There have been, and still are, various popular movements made up of lay people and led by popular leaders, who have often been viewed with suspicion and even persecuted. I am referring to “all those persons who journey, not as individuals, but as a closely-bound community of all and for all, one that refuses to leave the poor and vulnerable behind… ‘Popular’ leaders, then, are those able to involve everyone… They do not shun or fear those young people who have experienced hurt or borne the weight of the cross.”
81. These popular leaders know that solidarity “also means fighting against the structural causes of poverty and inequality; of the lack of work, land and housing; and of the denial of social and labor rights. It means confronting the destructive effects of the empire of money… Solidarity, understood in its deepest sense, is a way of making history, and this is what the popular movements are doing.” For this reason, when different institutions think about the needs of the poor, it is necessary to “include popular movements and invigorate local, national and international governing structures with that torrent of moral energy that springs from including the excluded in the building of a common destiny.” Popular movements, in fact, invite us to overcome “the idea of social policies being a policy for the poor, but never with the poor and never of the poor, much less part of a project which can bring people back together.” If politicians and professionals do not listen to them, “democracy atrophies, turns into a slogan, a formality; it loses its representative character and becomes disembodied, since it leaves out the people in their daily struggle for dignity, in the building of their future.” The same must be said of the institutions of the Church.
92. We must continue, then, to denounce the “dictatorship of an economy that kills,” and to recognize that “while the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is being born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” There is no shortage of theories attempting to justify the present state of affairs or to explain that economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything. Nevertheless, the dignity of every human person must be respected today, not tomorrow, and the extreme poverty of all those to whom this dignity is denied should constantly weigh upon our consciences.
113. Indeed, “any Church community, if it thinks it can comfortably go its own way without creative concern and effective cooperation in helping the poor to live with dignity and reaching out to everyone, will also risk breaking down, however much it may talk about social issues or criticize governments. It will easily drift into a spiritual worldliness camouflaged by religious practices, unproductive meetings and empty talk.”
114. Nor is it a question merely of providing for welfare assistance and working to ensure social justice. Christians should also be aware of another form of inconsistency in the way they treat the poor. In reality, “the worst discrimination which the poor suffer is the lack of spiritual care… Our preferential option for the poor must mainly translate into a privileged and preferential religious care.” Yet, this spiritual attentiveness to the poor is called into question, even among Christians, by certain prejudices arising from the fact that we find it easier to turn a blind eye to the poor. There are those who say: “Our task is to pray and teach sound doctrine.” Separating this religious aspect from integral development, they even say that it is the government’s job to care for them, or that it would be better not to lift them out of their poverty but simply to teach them to work. At times, pseudo-scientific data are invoked to support the claim that a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty. Or even that we should opt for pastoral work with the so-called elite, since, rather than wasting time on the poor, it would be better to care for the rich, the influential and professionals, so that with their help real solutions can be found and the Church can feel protected. It is easy to perceive the worldliness behind these positions, which would lead us to view reality through superficial lenses, lacking any light from above, and to cultivate relationships that bring us security and a position of privilege.
“on equal terms with all souls”
Each in their own way discovered that the poorest are not only objects of our compassion, but teachers of the Gospel. It is not a question of “bringing” God to them, but of encountering him among them. All of these examples teach us that serving the poor is not a gesture to be made “from above,” but an encounter between equals, where Christ is revealed and adored.
Unable to transcend entirely our location in time and space, we never see any life, including our own, in such a transcendent [“on the whole”] way. It presupposes, really, God’s own perspective; hence, in making such judgments we think of ourselves and others in terms of the relation to God. This need not blind us to the many distinctions within everyday social life, for dissimilarity is, as Kierkegaard notes, the mark (though a confusing mark) of temporal life. “But the neighbor is eternity’s mark—on every human being.” Since we stand equally distant from (or near to) the Eternal One, we are radically equal in those moments when our life is judged “on the whole,” as only God can see it.
… Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy recounts an old ritual in Austria in which
the corpse of the emperor was ordered to be carried to the door of an abbey. The chamberlain who leads the cortège knocks at the door. A friar opens the window and asks: “Who knocks?”—“The Emperor.”—“I know no man of that name.” The chamberlain knocks again. “Who is there?”—“The Emperor Francis Joseph.”—“We do not know him.” Third knock, and the same question. After reflection, the chamberlain now answers: “Brother Francis.” Then the door opens to receive a comrade in the army of death, on equal terms with all souls.”
Once again, Kierkegaard sees the point: “There is not a single person in the whole world who is as surely and as easily recognized as the neighbor. You can never confuse him with anyone else, since the neighbor, to be sure, is all people. . . . If you save a person’s life in the dark, thinking that it is your friend—but it was the neighbor—this is no mistake.” […]
The dignity of our humanity and the dignity of our person thus coinhere. We know persons only as bodies, and when we encounter a living human body our moral task is to seek to recognize the person who is there. I doubt that anyone can simply be compelled into such recognition by rational argument alone. The heart must be open to recognize personal dignity in every living human being… We must be ready to set aside the notion that we should evaluate their claim to personal dignity and accept the truth that, in our willingness or unwillingness to acknowledge it, we judge ourselves.
“so authentic that we feel struck by a light”
The existential awareness of what faith truly is and thus of what Christ truly is—the living discovery of the value of our unity, of our community, of what the Church truly is—these are not the fruit of a reasoning process nor of our study. They are instead the fruit of an encounter.
Encounter means the event of the relationship with a person and with a community whose richness is so authentic that we feel struck by a light and called to a life that is different and more true.
In this encounter, the value of faith and the value of the historical reality of the Church begin to appear in a concrete manner (not one that is abstract or theoretical)—in a real manner, to the point that it provokes us to make a total response. Because when the person is really provoked, he feels the totality of his life put in play.
If it is not like this, if it does not have to do with a totality, it is not yet the discovery of faith but simply the knowledge or practice of some religious form.
We can say, paradoxically, that Christianity is not a religion but a life.
rigorous fideism
The point was not to avoid the “question of truth” but rather to distinguish it from the “question of interpretation,” the better to answer the latter properly, thereby improving one’s chances of understanding whatever theological truth-claims one wishes to make.
19. What [Hans] Frei does intend to avoid, however, is the task of supplying systematic justification of his position, especially if that means adopting a language alien to scripture as the ultimate source of epistemic authority. Frei is convinced that truth-claims, for example, about the identity of Jesus Christ, are essential to Christian theology rightly understood, and as a Christian theologian he is perfectly prepared to make them. But systematically justifying such truth-claims, in the sense of offering compelling reasons within some other language … for accepting the vocabulary and ontology one would presuppose in using scripture, is: (a) in all likelihood impossible, (b) in tension with characteristically Christian conceptions of faith, and (c) obviously antithetical to Anselmian theology*. One cannot defend Anselmian theology by such means without falling into contradiction. So Frei does not try. This does not make him an irrationalist, for he can still claim that he is justified in accepting the truth-claims he makes as a Christian, and he can still engage in a kind of reasoned argument against his opponents. Being justified in believing something and being able to justify it to someone else, especially in a language of that person’s choosing, are not the same thing. And it is possible to make reasonable arguments against one’s opponents by restricting oneself to ad hoc apologetics, exhibiting what [David H.] Kelsey calls “the partial inadequacy of the available alternatives” and showing that the Anselmian program can succeed on its own terms.
*Stout describes “Anselmiam theology” under the motto “faith seeking understand”: “The understanding they [Anselmian theologians] seek is, as they see it, wholly achievable within scripture but not wholly exhausted by the know-how involved in using scripture in such activities as prayer, worship, preaching, and practical deliberation within the community. The central task of theology, on this view, is precisely to elucidate the use of scripture by describing, more or less as an ethnographer would, the characteristic patterns of attitude-acquisition, inference, and action scripture makes possible. As reflexive ethnographers, such theologians are not condemned merely to repeat sentences from the scripture or liturgy of the Christian community, but neither are they engaged in an effort to translate scripture into a linguistic framework alien to it. Rather, convinced that scripture is not a static system, they are fully prepared to develop conceptual resources within scripture that will assist in the task of Christian self-description. Because they stand fully and self-consciously within scripture, according to it whatever privileged status it implicitly or explicitly claims for itself, they are hesitant to treat any other language as its equal in conversation, let alone as a privileged source of intelligibility and truth.”
Personally, I like this a lot. But I definitely bounce between it and the “Dialogical method” which, according to Stout, “seeks to correlate scripture with the languages of our own age, though without according either side of the correlation privileged status and without supposing that it will be possible to arrive at an integrated theory for determining such matters. The Dialogical theologian moves back and forth between scripture and other languages, hoping to bring them into deeper and more meaningful conversation, all the while treating them (in Frei’s words) as ‘heterogenous equals.’ He or she may introduce theory or utter hermeneutical generalizations, so long as such remarks do not themselves take on the character of a privileged language. ‘Theory’ and ‘hermeneutics’ here remain parasitical upon the process of conversation itself. They are merely the conversation in its moments of reflective self-inventory. They do not replace it with a free-standing linguistic system into which the conversation must be translated in order to be meaningful.”
“the grace of laughter”
In imitation of the cry of dereliction from the Cross, Buechner writes that this desire to heal from loneliness is a prayer that asks,
My God, where the Hell are you, meaning If thou art our Father who art in Heaven, be thou also our Father who art in Hell because Hell is where the action is, where I am and the cross is. It is where the pitiless storm is. It is where men labor and are heavy laden under the burden of their own lives without you.
Crying to God to join suffering man in the depths of Hell reveals a desire for intimacy with the God who already entered into this state and showed us that even the most sinful person is not so isolated that he or she can’t meet God in those depths. To confront the seeming isolation of our darkest curvature inwards is to find God already waiting for us there.
This fact that there is neither height nor depth that can separate even the tragically alone from the love of God introduces the possibility that our isolation in sin can be overcome in the twinkling of an eye when the promise of God becomes real in time and eternity. The first of Buechner’s cross-references for laughter mentions the story of faith contained in Sarah’s laughter at the promise of a child in her old age, a promise so startling that it takes Sarah’s breath away. Buechner reminds us,
Faith is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,’ says the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:1). Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called laughter. If someone had come up to Jesus when he was on the cross and asked him if it hurt, he might have answered, like the old man in the joke, ‘Only when I laugh.’ But he wouldn’t have been joking. Faith dies, as it lives, laughing.
Tucked between the doctrinal claim that faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the possibility of Jesus Himself laughing through His assurance in the eventual defeat of His Passion’s suffering, Sarah’s laughter receives the child with a joke of a name that showed how little she believed that God would live up to His promise to her husband. When Buechner returns to the image of Sarah and Abraham’s laughter at God’s pledge, he notes that the laughter comes from their self-awareness that only a fool would believe this promise, yet they are these fools, and ‘[t]hey are laughing because laughing is better than crying and maybe not even all that different.’ Again, Buechner shows the interconnection between those dry and empty years when Sarah and Abraham are caught up in the aching loneliness of a childless marriage that longs for more and the sudden possibility that the very desires of their hearts would be fulfilled long past the point of reasonable likelihood.
the church confesses.
The church confesses that it has looked on silently as the poor were exploited and robbed, while the strong were enriched and corrupted.
The church confesses its guilt toward the countless people whose lives have been destroyed by slander, denunciation, and defamation. It has not condemned the slanderers for their wrongs and has thereby left the slandered to their fate.
The church confesses that it has coveted security, tranquillity, peace, property, and honor to which it had no claim, and therefore has not bridled human covetousness, but promoted it.
The church confesses itself guilty of violating all of the Ten Commandments. It confesses thereby its apostasy from Christ. It has not so borne witness to the truth of God in a way that leads all inquiry and science to recognize its origin in this truth. It has not so proclaimed the righteousness of God that all human justice must see there its own source and essence. It has not been able to make the loving care of God so credible that all human economic activity would be guided by it in its task. By falling silent the church became guilty for the loss of responsible action in society, courageous intervention, and the readiness to suffer for what is acknowledged as right. It is guilty of the government’s falling away from Christ.
Is this going too far? Should a few super-righteous people rise at this point and try to prove that not the church but all the others are guilty? Would a few churchmen [Kirchenmänner] like to dismiss this as a rude insult and, presuming to be called as judges of the world, proceed to weigh the mass of guilt here and there and distribute it accordingly? Was not the church hindered and bound on all sides? Was not all worldly power arrayed against it? Should the church have endangered its ultimate purpose, its public worship and its congregational life, by taking up the struggle against anti-Christian powers? So speaks unbelief, which perceives confession of guilt not as regaining the form of Jesus Christ who bore the sins of the world, but only as a dangerous moral degradation. Free confession of guilt is not something that one can take or leave; it is the form of Jesus Christ breaking through in the church. The church can let this happen to itself, or it will cease to be the church of Christ.
organic techno-optimist optimization
But beneath the crunchy-conservative advice about how to get kids to eat organic lies a techno-optimism strikingly like that of the pediatrician prescribing semaglutide to sixth-graders. “What if we treated humans like rockets, equipping them with sensors before systems fail, to understand where dysfunction is arising so we can address it?” Means writes in Good Energy. The metaphor is borrowed from Josh Clemente, her co-founder at Levels, who is an alumnus of SpaceX. Reducing food to its component parts, and eating habits to an “individualized” health plan, makes it easy to turn the human body into a machine.
Yet Means sees her solutions for chronic disease as not mechanistic but spiritual, in contrast to those of the soulless medical establishment. “Everything is connected,” she writes in her book. And the “spiritual crisis” of America’s chronic disease epidemic is “an assault on the miraculous flow of cosmic energy from the sun, through the soil and plants, through bacteria in my gut, through my cells’ mitochondria to create the energy that sparks my consciousness.”
This is why individualized tech is so much more promising for her than the old wait-and-drug medical model, which waits until people get fat and sick and then charges them to treat their symptoms. “We have the potential to live the longest, healthiest lives in human history, but this will require optimization,” she writes.
otherwise not
On August 1, 1941, the parish openly said no for the first time. The week before, the town hall gave us an order from the government: “August 1 is a national holiday. Clergymen will have the bells of their churches rung at full peal for fifteen minutes starting at noon.”
I showed the order to Amélie, our tiny concierge, who worked in our home from time to time. “It goes without saying,” I told her, “that you will do nothing of the sort, even if someone tries to make you do so.” Amélie understood completely.
On August 2, I encountered Amélie in the village. The bells of the Catholic church had rung resoundingly, while those of our church had remained silent.
“Well, Amélie, did everything go well yesterday? No incidents?”
“Fine, Mr. Trocmé. No problems.”
“No visitors?”
“Oh, yes, two women from the villas in the hills. You know, women who were all made-up.”
“And?”
“They came looking for me. ‘You’re not ringing the bells, Amélie? Today is a national holiday.’”
“‘The pastor didn’t tell me to,’ I told them.”
“Well, given your pastor, that’s no surprise. Hurry up, Amélie. It’s already noon. It’s an order from the Maréchal.”
Amélie recounted these events with a sly, little smile.
“And how did you respond?” I asked her.
“I told them, ‘The bells don’t belong to the Maréchal, they belong to God. We ring them for God; otherwise not.’”
“Bravo! And what happened?”
“They ordered me to open the door for them so that they could ring the bells since I wouldn’t do it. I defended my church! I told them I would not open the door and they had no right to enter without the pastor’s permission. I stood firmly in front of the door. Wait, I’ll show you.” Amélie stationed herself squarely in front of me as she had before the two women, her short arms courageously spread wide apart to defend her church.
“How did everything end, Amélie?” Once again, she smiled mischievously.
“Oh, as you know, yesterday at noon, it was raining buckets. I was sheltered under the beam of the heavy door. They were in the courtyard. Soon they were drenched and left.”
Nothing had happened, Amélie had told me, since the bells had not rung. Her courageous resistance was nothing to her, hardly worth mentioning. If, like pulling teeth, I hadn’t drawn it out of her, I never would have known this story, so worthy of the Huguenots of old, who were unable to recant because they didn’t know how.
