In the last essay in this series, we walked through two alternate and opposed readings of the Gospel of Luke, and specifically, how God’s work in the history of the world is interpreted. As we saw there, God does not call us to be agents of effective action in our work for justice and peace; rather, God calls us to be agents of love, through the works of charity. As I pointed out back at the beginning of this series, this is a seemingly controversial and radial statement to make in progressive Christian circles, where charity is viewed so often as a band-aid of sorts, slapped over the hurts of the world with some view to curing, but mostly with the intention of covering up and ignoring. While this instinctual suspicion is not wrong, considering how charity has come to be weaponized in our capitalistic world as a tool against just social change, Hauerwas is calling us to a different, deeper and more holistic understanding of what charity should be for the Christian concerned with social justice.

Today’s post builds on the last: if we accept that the work of making history come out right is God’s work, and not ours, then how can we know God’s work when we see it? As we noted last time, too often God’s name is applied to a range of works and deeds that are completely anti-Christian and against what God desires for our world. This makes things very confusing! How are we limited human beings supposed to identify God’s work in the world?

Luckily, we have an example, by looking at God’s very own self in the form of Christ, and the work Christ did for us, as laid out in the Gospels. Want to know what God’s work in history looks like? Read the Gospels. Want to know what grafting our story into Christ’s looks like, what kind of concrete action is required of us if we are going to be called “Christians?” Read the Gospels. Christ is a living, breathing example of not just God’s work in remaking all of history, but in what kind of work we are called to do alongside God.

Hauerwas begins by pointing out that is would be natural for us to assume that, because God’s task of setting the world right is so big, it naturally requires the mechanism of power, and thus, we like to think this must mean that Christians are called to seize the levers of power, or to at least ally with those who control them. As Hauerwas illustrates so well, “it is natural to assume that Christ should have gone straight to the top – if not Caesar, at least Pilate…Or at least, failing there, then Jesus should have gone to the Left – the Zealots or some other group of revolutionists who opposed Caesar and Pilate.”

But, as we see in the Gospels, this is not the path Christ took in his work of remaking the world. “Instead,” Hauerwas writes, “we notice in Luke it is emphasized that Jesus came to the poor and the sinners.” And further, “Jesus in Luke is almost exclusively concerned with the poor.” The first and greatest clue to how Christians are called to be in the world is to see that Christ spent his entire ministry among the poor, among the oppressed, among the sick, among the foreigners, among the unclean and unwelcome.

On the other hand, it’s not like Jesus hung out with the poor, but ignored the rich and powerful. Oh no. Hauerwas points out, “it is to the poor that the good news comes, not those of strength or wealth. Indeed, it is exactly the latter who are in deep trouble as their wealth and strength gives them the illusion they can be safe in this world. Thus Christ says with no qualification, ‘none of you can be a disciple of mine without parting with all his possessions.’” Jesus’ choice to live among and for the poor is also an active commentary on the rich and powerful; the poor are chosen, while the rich are not, to host the presence of God in the world.

But why the poor? If God is remaking the history of our world, wouldn’t it make more practical sense to reshape the loci of power? I mean, hanging with the poor is great and all, but if you really want to make change happen, shouldn’t you be influencing power, rubbing elbows, making policies, focusing power? But, again, with God, it’s not about practicality, or effectiveness, or “getting results”, at least as the world would count those things. God is with the weak because in the weak, the poor, the powerless, and the meek, we most clearly get to see what God is like, and what God wants for the world. Hauerwas writes, “what we see involved in Christ’s concern for the poor and the weak is how God chooses to deal with history, namely, through the weak. But what he does for the weak is not make them as the world knows strength, but rather provides us with a savior who teaches us how to be weak without regret.”

Weakness is the key. Effectiveness is eschewed, because weakness is not effective according to the power hierarchies of the world. And thus, our work of charity in the world becomes not about what we can achieve, but about the goodness of doing a kind deed for someone else for the sake of itself. “For we cannot give charity if we think that charity is a means to renew the world – that is, if charity is justified by its effects.” To do charity without the intention of acting with love, but with the intention of using that charity for a greater end is to turn that human being you are serving into a means to an ideological end. This is the key point on which this all turns. Just as Christ was offered all of the effective means to change the world in the Temptations, if only he would willingly sacrifice a small measure of his dependence on God, so we are called to turn away from the lure of easy, assured fixes if they cause us to stray from being a part of the story of Christ.

This seems like a rather hopeless fate for Christians. If we aren’t supposed to work with the goal to make the world a better place, what’s the point of social action? Wouldn’t we just be better off being nice to others and minding our own business? Not at all. Our ineffective stance towards the world has purpose: it makes us a part of God’s story, as witnessed in Christ. “What we are offered in Christ is a story that helps us sustain the task of charity in a world where it can never be successful…We are freed in this respect exactly because we know that charity is not required in order to justify our existence, to rid us of guilt, but because it is the manner of being most like God.” We are charitable, meek, loving, weak, ineffective because that is the form God took when God came into the word and took human form. God was not concerned with effectiveness when embodied as Christ; if that would have been the case, I doubt God would have been content with dying an early and violent death! To quote Hauerwas one final time:

“For we are commanded not to be revolutionaries, or to be world-changers, but simply to be perfect.”

One of the most powerful theological concepts out there is the idea of kenosis. Kenosis is a Greek word applied to Christ, which literally means “the act of emptying.” It derives from the great hymn of Philippians 2, specifically verse 7. Here is the context:

5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

Christ emptied himself, he made himself nothing, in order to do not his own earthly, human will, but in order to let God’s will enter him and guide his actions. Paul exhorts us in this letter to do the same: “Have this mind among yourselves.” 

I think an understanding of kenosis can help us start to make sense of what Hauerwas is doing in this essay. For so many of us, the drive to make the world better, to fight injustice, to do the work of changing things becomes an overwhelming urge. Not a bad one, mind you, but one which over time becomes less and less about God’s will and more about our own. Be honest. When you go out to work for social justice, are you opening your spirit to God, asking God which direction to lead, and emptying yourself so that God’s will – whatever that may be – can guide you? Is it about a humble, self-effacing, empty way of encountering the need in the world? Or have we got the answers, got all the plans? Are we looking for those social media opportunities, so we can let the world know what is happening, what we are doing? 

Emptying ourselves means letting go of the need to have control over what history looks like. It means not having all the answers. It means listening for the still, small voice of God that directs all of creation towards its fulfillment. It means simply showing up, being present to those near us, and acting with a kenotic love and charity towards those we encounter, not in the hope of reshaping the world in the image of some abstract idea of justice, but instead, just because it is the best, most Christ-like thing to do right in that moment. No, it probably won’t be systematic and organized all the time. But that’s ok. Faith means we trust that God can use each little moment of genuine love and connection among us to craft a better world for all.

Now, I can still feel all my fellow progressives and social justice-minded folks squirming at best, or more likely feeling disgusted or dismissive at this point. And let me tell you, I feel you. If this is where the chapter ended, and where Hauerwas stopped speaking, I would be too. But we aren’t done! Our next essay will be one more Scriptural illustration of this dichotomy between effectiveness and charity before we dig into the meat of how being ineffective still leads us to fighting against injustice, against suffering, and against oppression. Stick with me.

In opening his essay with a critique of liberation theology, Hauerwas was underscoring his main point: that Christian political engagement – and the theology under-girding it – is not judged on its effectiveness in the realm of worldly politics, but instead is to be judged on how Christians engage. In other words, the point for politically-conscious Christians should not be the end result, but instead should be the tactics and strategies we take to achieve things. Hauerwas describes his own purpose in writing as trying “to suggest how Christians should care for the poor, that is what form our charity should take, and in what sense such a charity is politics.” This here is the thesis statement of the entire essay. In future posts, I will get further into what Hauerwas means when he means “charity” but, following the track of the essay, first we must talk about the Gospel of Luke, because for Hauerwas, there is no good political theology if it is not grounded in the life and words of Christ as found in Scripture.

“In Luke,” Hauerwas writes, “we find the historical significance of Christianity, or as Luke prefers, the Way, most dramatically represented.” The Gospel of Luke is the most Gentile-centric of the four gospels we find in Scripture. Luke, most likely a Gentile himself, was writing his account of Christ and the early church to a Gentile audience, trying to bridge the Jewishness of Jesus to the Gentile culture of Greece and Rome. Luke was likely a disciple of Paul, himself someone famous for his commitment to bringing together Jews and Gentiles in one body. So, as he writing his account, Luke is looking to connect what could seemingly be sectarian or provincial tale of a far-flung religious disturbance to the wider happenings of the world, to make his readers understand how Christ is not merely another story on the world’s stage, but is instead the story from which the rest of history obtains its meaning. To quote Karl Barth:

For Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the covenant concluded by God with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and it is the reality of this covenant -not the idea of any covenant – which is the basis, the meaning and the goal of creation, that is, of everything that is real in distinction from God.

Understanding Luke’s Gentile audience is crucial to Hauerwas’ essay because Luke was perhaps the first Christian thinker (or perhaps the second, after Paul) to communicate the world-encompassing importance of the Christ event, and by extension, to make the claim that Christ is the key component of God’s salvation of the entire world, and not just the Jewish people. God fulfills the covenant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the work of Christ on Cross, and that work extends to all people, everywhere.

This concept is called a “theology of history”; that is, it is the work of examining the arc of history and the meaning of the human story through a theological lens. In Luke, Hauerwas perceives a very specific theology of history. He writes, “the fact that dominates Luke’s Gospel and Acts is that the Gentiles have been grafted onto the promise to Abraham.” This is Luke’s theology of history, and by extension, also Paul’s: through Christ’s work on the Cross, the Way is made open to all people to accept God’s promise of building a nation of people, as innumerable as the stars, and under the everlasting promise of God’s good grace first made to Abraham and the people of Israel in their covenants.

So, what does this have to do with charity and effectiveness? Hauerwas correctly sees that this promise of God, and its subsequent transformation into a understanding of God’s work in history, takes on radically different valences in the context of a regional subpower’s relationship with a deity than it does in the context of a globes-spanning religion backed by the military and economic power of nation-states. To put it more simply, Luke’s theology of history means something radically different in America in 2020 than it did in Palestine in 70 CE.

Hauerwas explains the reason this is true by identifying the implications of Luke’s theology of history: “This view of history would seem to mean that in a fashion Christians have the key to history – that is, we know its meaning and we know where it is going.” If, as Luke claims, the history of all the peoples of the world is tied up in the salvation offered by Christ, then surely those of us who call ourselves Christians have some kind of stake in how the world turns out, right? If Christ extended the Abrahamic covenant to all of the world, then we seemingly have a covenantal duty to make sure that all the nations of the world become part of God’s nation. “For the Christ we Christians serve seems to commit us to having a stake in how history comes out.”

This creates a problem. If we Christians have a stake in the course of history, what happens when that history goes badly? If we, through the promise of the universal Christ, are responsible for the shape of world events, what does, for instance, the Holocaust mean for how well we are doing our jobs? The only logical answer, of course, is that we must fix it, and more importantly (in this understanding of history), we have a Christian responsibility to do so! And a necessary corollary of that responsibility becomes that we must change the world no matter what it takes to do so. The goal of God’s kingdom, brought about by our actions, is so important that we must get there, that we must not let the fallen nature of humanity and our misguided will be impediments to the goal. Take action, history seems to tell us, and let the future judge the results and not the actions. 

Are you starting to see how this kind of thinking – this misinterpretation of Luke’s theology of history – has led to so much evil and wrong in the world, done in the name of Christ? If we are responsible for the world – if our telos, our end goal, as Christians is the salvation of this world with a remit to fix things now – then we feel empowered to pursue almost any means to achieve that ends, as long as we are sure to state clearly throughout that we are Christians. Thus, God’s name can be invoked, for instance, in justifying war, as long as that war’s stated goal is the betterment of the world in accordance with the covenantal heritage extended to us through Christ.

At this point, it becomes rather simple for actors with bad or impure intentions to invoke the imprimatur of Christ to justify a whole host of actions contrary to the life of Christ. In short, in order to combat injustice done not in Christ’s name, this model lets us commit injustices to defeat those other injustices, as long as we confidently declare God to be on our side. You can see in this kind of reasoning, for example, the route some Christians take to justify the death penalty; we must stop murder by committing murder, because somehow our own murder is more just. Further, when paired with certain takes on atonement and missiology, more harm can be done, through justifications tied to a wrathful, retributive God, and a divine mandate to convert the world to our religion or else.

It’s not just bad or disingenuous actors who use this justification, either. Our rightful shock and disgust with the path human history has taken – and our own implication in the guilt of that history – seemingly requires even those of us justice minded folks to feel we need to “fix” history in order to do the work of God’s kingdom. Hauerwas is worth quoting at length here:

Thus our history gives us an even more powerful reason to combine charity with power and the effectiveness it brings. For we think the way to learn to live with a wrong is to make it a right. Indeed our history has been flawed, but we can rectify our past by changing our history to make it come out right. In other words, our very guilt makes us require a God not just of charity but also who gives us the power to do good. We want him to be a God of love, but a love that is coupled with the power to make that love effective.

This brings us back, then, to effectiveness and charity. Luke’s theology of history is important to our study because how we read it profoundly influences how we believe Christians are meant to act in the world. In the reading we have been examining so far, Luke’s theology of history seemingly hinges on what it is we are after – that is, the focus is on what we – emphasis on the “we” here; we are the primary actors in this telling of the story – imagine a just world ruled by God’s covenant must look like in the end. From here, acting in charity – that is, acting with that which Thomas Aquinas called “the most excellent of the virtues” – is not the primary focus of Christian social engagement, but rather, effectiveness is: how much can you get done, and what is the quickest way you can do it?

But, as Hauerwas has started to open our eyes to, this is a “profound misreading of Luke.” Please forgive me, but I must quote him at length one more time in order to unpack this point more effectively (emphasis is all mine):

For what Luke suggests is not that Christians are called to determine the meaning of history, that we have a responsibility to make history come out right, but rather that that is God’s task. What God has done in Israel and Christ is the meaning of history, but that does not mean it is the Christian’s task to make subsequent events conform to God’s kingdom. Rather the Christian’s task is nothing other than to make the story that we find in Israel and Christ our story. We do not know how God intends to use such obedience, we simply have the confidence he will use it even if it does not appear effective in the world itself…For in the form of the life of Christ is the form of how God chooses to deal with the world and how he chooses for us to deal with the world.

Phew. That’s some good theology right there.

Alright, let’s unpack that a little bit. In this passage, Hauerwas is posing the first look at the alternative he is presenting to the “politics of effectiveness” that comes out of that other reading of Luke. Rather than counting how close we come to abstract vision of how we think God would want the world to look (a exercise of monumental hubris if you really think about it for a second), the proper reading of Luke’s theology of history is one that understands the making of God’s kingdom as God’s own work. God is the builder, not us; rather, we are called to carry out our task, which is the task of grafting ourselves onto the story of Christ and his Church, as seen in the Gospels. In faith, we perform the tasks of charity, knowing God will shape such acts for the good.

And what form does that task take? Why, it is the form of Christ himself: a servant, humble, compassionate, merciful, abounding in grace, reveling in truth, rejoicing in the kinship of all of humanity. The work we are called to, in the greater task of God’s building of a nation, is to “love as God loves.” That’s it. It may not always be effective in the way the world counts effectiveness. But that was never really our goal, was it?

One final note: it can be easy to read this as an endorsement of political quietism, of a rapid withdrawal and disengagement in the world, and thus a kind of chosen ignorance about the injustices of this world as it is now. Simply claiming that it is God’s job to fix the world is the kind of political abdication practiced by so many toxic forms of mainstream, therapeutic pseudo-Christianity, right?

To understand the politics of charity in this way is to discount the potential embedded in the example of Christ to change the world. The example of Christ – the example of the peacemaker, of He who was willing to turn the other cheek and give of himself wastefully and to even die rather than wield power – is sufficient for the making of the world. It is the lie of the world to try to make us believe otherwise. We aren’t to become meek, humble, compassionate, loving and peaceful as a way of therapeutically avoiding the world’s suffering, as this lie would have us think. No, we are called to this imitation of Christ precisely so that we may more clearly see the suffering and injustice in the world around us, and then respond to it in a way that is truly effective, in the way effectiveness is counted by God. Will this always lead to a political, legislative, or activist victory? Not at all. But for Christians, our understanding of victory is counted on a different scale.

That brings us to the question of my next essay: what is the locus of our charitable politics in this world? Where and with whom do we practice putting on the story of Christ? The answer looks very shocking to a world dependent on – addicted to – the illusion of effective action and the wielding of power.