The Fundamental Dilemma
Photo by Aidan Bartos on Unsplash
With few exceptions, most of us in mainline (old line) Protestantism arrive at church carrying with us a deep and unacknowledged ambiguity. (I think it is the same for others beyond such Protestantism who arrive at church.) We arrive at church to pray and sing because we do indeed treasure the gospel as the truth of our lives. At the same time, we arrive at church with deep images pressed into our imagination concerning US exceptionalism, racial superiority, and economic expectations for success. It is this ambiguity that requires preachers to tread so carefully, lest the ambiguity be rawly exposed. This task is made even more delicate since most of the time the preacher carries the same ambiguity in his or her life. This ambiguity is our contemporary form of the old “Halfway Covenant” that the Puritans devised in 1662 in order to make room in the church for the “baptized but unconverted” parents to have their children baptized. It was a way of allowing in the church those who were nominally committed to the gospel but who were able to hold back from faith with reservations based on other grounds. The Halfway Covenant (and our widespread ambiguity) makes the church and its worship an unsettled, uneasy proposition, one that can be sorted out only with care, honesty, and passion. My purpose here is to consider that ambiguity that sits at the heart of the church as it gathers.
I was alerted to this implicit but mostly unacknowledged reality by reading The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism became the Religion of Modernity by Eugene McCarraher (2019). In articulating this “fundamental dilemma,” McCarraher asserts:
The gradual demise of the Puritan social gospel was witness to the fundamental dilemma of the elect: their quest for a beloved community built on the foundations of capitalist enterprise. They resolved the dilemma with a covenant theology of capitalism, a creed whose doctrinal elements included the affirmation of wealth as a divine appointment; territorial conquest to enlarge the parameters of God’s rich and faithful metropolis; a conception of the natural world as a providential storehouse of vendable wonders; and a jeremiad tradition to chastise moral failing and obscure the intractable persistence of the dilemma (117).
McCarraher suggests four components to this dilemma: I suggest there are four acute accent points in our articulation of the gospel that require sustained pastoral consideration if the church is to be freed for missional energy and missional engagement:
Wealth as divine appointment
1. The affirmation of wealth as a divine appointment. The Book of Proverbs readily attests that God blesses the rich as those who are in sync with the creator and the ordering of creation:
A slack hand cause poverty,
but the hand of the diligent makes rich (Proverbs 10:4).
The blessing of the Lord makes rich,
and he adds no sorrow with it (Proverbs 10:22).
Some freely give yet grow all the richer;
others withhold what is due, and only suffer want (Proverbs 11:24).
The reward for humility and fear of the Lord
is riches and honor and life (Proverbs 22:4).
By wisdom a house is built,
and by understanding it is established;
by knowledge the rooms are filled
with all precious and pleasant riches (Proverbs 24:3-4).
King Solomon, moreover, stands as the great embodiment that wealth follows pious obedience:
I now do according to your word. Indeed I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you. I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor all your life; no other king shall compare with you (I Kings 3:12-13).
It is not different in the Sinai covenant of Israel that promises material blessing to those who keep Torah (Deuteronomy 28:1-15).
It was easy enough for the Puritans to take over this connection of piety and wealth under the rubric that piety would and did produce great accumulation. Before long, however, in the United States the great accumulation of wealth became disconnected from genuine piety and made it an end in itself, so that making money and amassing wealth were readily taken as measures of a vocation. Thus the early claim of “providential blessing” was easily converted into wealth for the sake of wealth. With that conversion of the old formula, being wealthy came to be a mark of virtue and therefore a powerful force in the political, public arena. We have fully embraced, in our society, the “Golden Rule”: Those with the gold make the rules! As a consequence, government oversight and regulations are characteristically stacked in favor of wealth. The recent emergence of mega-billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos has become a reiteration of the “robber barons” of a century ago, now without the restraints of anti-trust legislation. To some great extent our political process is propelled by the force of wealth. Such wealth, evoked by limitless greed, is of course inimical to the neighbor love of the Torah and the gospel, for such wealth is inescapably and predictably dependent upon cheap labor. The extent to which church members arrive to worship with such a conviction of wealth as virtue, is the extent to which the claims of the gospel may cause discomfort or anxiety. It is the work of preaching, teaching, and interpretation to expose this contradiction to light, and make it available for fresh decision-making.
Territorial Conquest and Western Christianity
2. The impetus toward territorial conquest has been intrinsic to Western Christianity since the earliest days of “Exploration and Discovery” when European adventurers set out for the New World. Propelled by a search for wealth, such explorers (and their patrons) were free to exploit the resources of the New World, including its human resources. The Church’s early “Doctrine of Discovery” gave such European explorers the right to possess and plunder anything they could find. Thus the Doctrine of Discovery led, over time, to wave after wave of colonialization, enslavement, and genocide.
The zeal for territorial conquest continued in the early colonies of the United States, as white settlers ruthlessly and relentlessly displaced the indigenous population with the claim of “Manifest Destiny.” After settlement on the Atlantic Coast, the colonists pushed westward and “necessarily” eliminated the native populations. Finally in 1828 the Doctrine of Discovery was read into US law by the Supreme Court, so that the violent western push for land had no restraint. With the settlement and conquest of the continent, the territorial imperative, under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, looked beyond the mainland to other “colonies and territories” under the imagined claim that the “natives” could not govern themselves.
I suppose that JFK’s spectacular “moon landing” on July 20, 1969 (in response to the Soviet Sputnik of October 4, 1957) was the ultimate symbol of territorial conquest. That elaborately staged event was readily taken to be a wondrous US triumph. This story of land possession without interruption or limit well served the US conviction of exceptionalism. As a result, Americans, including Christian Americans, could take this triumph as confirmation of entitlement and privilege among the peoples of the world. American Christians could innocently sing of a global “mission” of the United States:
America, America!
May God thy gold refine
till all success be nobleness
and every gain divine!...
America, America!
God shed his grace on thee,
and crown thy good with brotherhood
from sea to shining sea!
These beloved words offer a coy combination of destiny, wealth, and virtue, land conquest as a gift from God. So now American military power is established in hidden and neglected byways in order to assure Pax Americana around the world. It helps that we are able to link this unending conquest of territory to the narrative of the Book of Joshua wherein the “chosen” people violently displace the indigenous population.
To the extent that this assumption of entitlement and privilege is shared among us, to that extent church worship is a jarring interruption. Such worship invites to an alternative governance of debts forgiven and bread shared. Thus church worship calls into question our most elemental societal assumptions of entitlement and privilege. It is enough to place us in crisis; or better, to bring to light the crisis we carry in our denial-driven bodies because we know better.
Creation as a Storehouse of Vendable Wonders
3. The creed of capitalism affirms that the natural world is a “storehouse of vendable wonders.” The operational word is “vendable.” Everything in the natural world can be transformed into a sellable product. Already under the wise tutelage of Francis Bacon and John Locke, Christians were instructed in the fine art of private money-making that took the world as viable commodity. See Cameron Whybrow, The Bible, Baconianism, and Mastery over Nature: The Old Testament and its Modern Misreading (1991). That passionate commercialization of the world gives no thought to “using up” or exhausting the material creation, for it is easily assumed that the supply is limitless. Thus the spendthrift marketing of timber, water, oil, and whatever the land would produce, has been unrestrained in service to the accumulation of private wealth. The exploitation of natural resources follows from the sense of entitlement about the land (see above) and the limitless propulsion of wealth (see above). And now we have reached, in exhaustion, nearly to the end of “the Industrial Revolution” that saw the world as a commodity. The final exhaustion of the land of cotton plantations is measure of the limits of commoditization wherein fruitful land has morphed into an endless patch of kudzu.
When we practitioners of land as commodity come to church, we are confronted with the claim that,
The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world and those who live in it (Psalm 24:1).
The lines ring in our ears! “Not ours!” Not mine to sell, not mine to exhaust. Not ours to use up! The current accent on environmentalism is a belated recognition of the claim that we, alongside the earth and its many diverse creatures, are yet creatures who stand in solidarity with other creatures in gladness before the creator of us all. This claim of creator-creatures, now given secular attestation in environmentalism, is the awareness that we are not users but caretakers. Church worship is an opportunity to sort out our identity with the earth and its other creatures. Such “sorting out” matters decisively, because the hard and urgent issue of creation as vulnerable and limited is not to be staged in grand theological utterance but through arguments about regulation, restraint, tax policy, and money-making at all costs. Church worship is an arena through which and in which we may be repositioned in the world, not as masters but as co-creatures. We receive our life together from the creator, and give it back to the creator in gratitude, generosity, and in solidarity with other well-beloved creatures of God.
A Church of Sharp Indignation and No Self-Reflection
4. The repertoire of capitalism, McCarraher concludes, includes a “jeremiad tradition” that is fully ready for sharp indignation in making moral judgments. In liberal churches the jeremiad tends to concern social justice issues, and we make such fierce objections while we collude in the aforementioned ideology. Conversely, conservative so-called evangelical churches specialize in jeremiads concerning moral failures with reference to sexual and familial matters. But the jeremiads in general avoid the real questions to which McCarraher so well points. The jeremiads serve, as he says, to obscure the intractable persistence of the dilemma of being of two minds, the mind of capitalism and the mind of the gospel, that is, the mind of God and the mind of Mammon.
The church at its most faithful does not believe that the dilemma is intractable. The church, in its worship, preaching, and teaching, has an opportunity to empower persons (all of us!) to face the ambiguity we carry in our bodies. The point is not to place people in crisis, but to bring to visibility the crisis we are in fact in. The crisis to be addressed is the elemental recognition that we are double-minded, and the double-mindedness is ultimately exhausting:
You cannot serve God and wealth (Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:13).
Or better, we cannot serve this God and mammon, because they are in contradiction to each other. The church is the only place in town where that contradiction can be brought to light and to speech, so that fresh, practical, concrete decisions can be made. The point is not to scold anyone, for that is an unproductive enterprise. Rather, it is to make available what we mostly manage to keep concealed from ourselves, namely, that it takes great energy to hide and deny the defining contradiction of our lives, the contradiction of God and capital.
So imagine that the church and its pastors take as a proper inescapable task the work of sorting out the ambiguity in practical ways. We may together come to fresh awarenesses:
1. Wealth is no measure of being with God. Indeed, wealth cannot deliver on its manifold promises. Many folk have discovered through the recent virus that the real treasure to be valued is the value of sustainable relationships that can yield comfort, relief, and assurance. The work is to see that what we most value is not property or material accumulation; it is trustworthy relationships that are definitional for a viable life filled with wellbeing. Money can never and will never be a substitute for trustworthy relationships. For that reason we in the church are committed to the practice of relationship that requires time, energy, and effort.
2. “Territorial conquest” may serve as a stand-in for every practice of wealth that requires anti-neighborly parsimonious violent action. The truth we always discover belatedly is that there is never enough of material accumulation to make us safe or to make us happy. There is always a need for more! Thus in our zeal for “national security,” for example, there is never enough, as yet, of armaments. There is always need for expansion, for newer systems of security, for greater investment, because restless uneasiness always belongs to such expansiveness.
I suppose the vision of disarmament in the prophetic oracle of Isaiah 2:2-4 is a welcome articulation of alternative:
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore (Isaiah 2:4).
Quite specifically, that same oracle in Micah 4:1-4 adds a line concerning an alternative life that is not included in the version of Isaiah:
But they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and none shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken (Micah 4:4).
Disarmament of “spears into pruning hooks” is not sufficient unless it is followed by a revamped economy that depends on changed appetites and desires. “Vine and fig tree” bespeak a sustainable quiet peasant life that is satisfied with modest desires and modest appetites. That is, the end of endless military aggression requires opting for an alternative social life that is satisfied with the resources and relationships of the neighborhood. That is the only viable alternative to endless conquest and conflict. It is a model of alternative that the church can readily champion as a vote for return to serious trustworthy relationality, and in resistance to reliance upon greater and greater technological capacity.
3. As the church teaches and learns to revalue relationships that give meaning, identity and body to our social existence, the world of vendable items becomes less and less compelling and persuasive. Such a practice invites us to shun the chance of being “rich in things and poor in soul” (“God of Grace and God of Glory,” Glory to God, 307).What an alternative to be “rich in soul” and therefore to be to some extent “poor in things”! Thus we may indeed disengage from the world of commercialism and the norms the market economy. There can hardly be a fuller embodiment of this alternative way of living than Jesus who “had nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). He lives from the generosity of the neighborhood, and his presence helped to evoke that generosity.
4. We know that it does no good to scold people. It also does no good to prattle on about social justice in generic terms. In like manner, it does conservative, so-called evangelicals no good to rant about family values. We may be finished with all of that. We may better focus on the wounds inflicted upon us and the wounds we inflict upon each other. We have enough sin and guilt to go around. But our preoccupation with sin—particularly the sin of other people—is an effort in futility. Better that we consider how we may practice generous interdependence and the risk of serious neighborly engagement.
We may imagine the church as a great forum of honesty that permits openness to our deep ambiguity, to walk into the ambiguity we carry in our bodies in order to make some fresh decisions. The overriding issue, as McCarraher makes clear, is God versus Mammon. That large formulation of our dilemma invites us to consider:
wealth vis-à-vis trustworthy relationships;
territorial conquest vis-à-vis reliance on the neighborhood;
vendable wonders vis-à-vis good social engagement;
jeremiads vis-à-vis honesty about wounds.
These are not grand theses. They are the realities of daily life where we act out our discipleship. Honesty in these matters might indeed move us back toward our true selves and away from enslavement to market values. We gather to affirm and celebrate a life more fully congruent with our status as creatures loved and summoned by the creator to the wondrous tasks of creatureliness.
Walter Brueggemann
December 2, 2022
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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