Stimulus Vol 14 Issue 3 August 2006 |
Table of ContentsForum of the Christian Left Dialogue The fundamentalist agenda ‘Fings ain’t what they used to be As a woman Confronting Ahab Response A prophet of God’s justice Response Response Towards a just society Response Response Michael Parmenter Interview Part 2 Musings on the blog Models & Metaphors Dialogue |
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August 2006 |
EditorialChurch and Society after Election 2005 – It’s politics Jim, but not as we know it.I’ve been a Leftist for as long as I can remember. Well, I remember secondary school and a group of us waving about copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao (The Little Red Book). One of that group became a professional politician. Currently he’s a Cabinet minister. We’d gather on the Raroa railway station, talk in earnest – cigarettes in hand, heads in the clouds. We talked about “the system”, “the concrete conditions of oppression”, and about “the people’s revolution”. Then we’d go off to nice, middle class homes and a hot cup of cocoa.
Many of my cohort carried on the revolution by going to university – of course uni had nothing at all to do with middle-class expectations and the free educational opportunity provided by the welfare state. And the revolution was there, for sure! Of the Lefties, with whom I was acquainted at uni, two more became members of this Labour government! Back then they were red hot about socialism. But these days they look only a wee bit pink, in a good light. The wise ones of the Right say that my one-time acquaintances have just grown up and that I should grow up too. But I’m pretty unrepentant. Indeed, back then I was less convinced by the Marxist critique than I am now – since then I’ve read the Bible! However, today I am much less convinced that the Left knows what it is and what it’s doing. The “Left” has become a grab-bag of miscellaneous minority causes – just because they are such causes – having lost its defining content, content that might then validate such concerns. These days it’s hard to think of the Left as still being the voice of, and advocate for, “the people” – particularly the obviously poor and clearly oppressed.
A fortiori, dialectical materialism has not delivered. Empirically, Fukuyama’s verdict, that the end of history has arrived in the apparent triumph of global capitalism, looks quite plausible, notwithstanding that this observation fails to address the “Why?” question. But even if you’re just a social democrat with old style interventionist leanings, epistemic modesty warns that it’s sheer hubris to think that human beings are capable of knowing enough and are skilled enough to control majorly the material conditions and macro economic system in which our lives are embedded.
Further, the Left/Right divide looks rather like another old modernist co-dependency. In these increasingly postmodern times, we do well to treat the rhetoric(s) of the Right and the Left with considerable suspicion: Who benefits from perpetuating such name calling? Jesus’ inclusion of the other deconstructs just such divisive labels and the idolatrous identities they endeavour to mandate. Notwithstanding a one-time association with the Catholic Workers Movement, one can hear a contemporary Christian commentator trying to re-commend Jesus’ ministry to Jim Anderton. “It’s politics Jim, but not as we know it.”
In his seminal book, The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder wrote, [Jesus] refused to concede that those in power represent an ideal, a logically proper, or even an empirically acceptable definition of what it means to be political. He did not say... you can have your politics and I shall do something else more important,” he said, “your definition of polis, of the social, of the wholeness of being human socially is perverted.”
Certainly, inasmuch as the Left continues to look for justice and transformation there is, in that search, significant commonality with the liberationist trajectory of the biblical story. But a close reading, of what may still be discerned to be the overarching biblical narrative, reveals significant aspects of it that don’t fit so well with the Leftist story – especially the awkward fact that God is the central player in the Bible, but not in Leftist rhetoric.
The Christian Left will be Christian inasmuch as it brings a distinctively Christian understanding of the issues it feels it has in common with Leftist concerns, and it will be Christian inasmuch as it practises politics Christianly – for example, inasmuch as it engages in open, Jesus motivated, dialogue with the so called Right, both Christian and “secular”. Such dialogue will be characterised, in part, by an absence of the name-calling and demonising that is the stock in trade of politics as we know it.
In his Pedagogue of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire wrote, Some may think that to affirm dialogue – the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world – is naïvely and subjectively idealistic. There is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans.
New Zealand’s recently-formed Forum of the Christian Left (FOCaL) arose out of frustration that often the media stereotypes Christian ethical and political views as Rightist and takes the fundamentalist manifestation of such matters as normative. FOCaL aims to present an alternative. One can find out more from FOCaL’s website, http:// www.focal.org.nz. The papers and responses in this issue were presented at FOCaL’s inaugural conference held in Wellington, New Zealand, on 30 June and 1 July, 2006. We trust that this record contributes to ongoing dialogue and greater wisdom in presenting the sociopolitical significance of the gospel.
Gavin Drew for the editorial committee
Douglas Maclachlan Publisher
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FOCaL Conference Papers The fundamentalist agenda |
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“...to be part of the gospel imperative to transform minds and put faith in God into practice.” |
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STIMULUS THE NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT AND PRACTICE |