Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance

Campbell, Goode

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781630879020
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

If prophets are called to unveil and expose the illegitimacy of those principalities masquerading as the right and purportedly using their powers for the good, then Will D. Campbell is one of the foremost prophets in American religious history. Like Clarence Jordan and Dorothy Day, Campbell incarnates the radical iconoclastic vocation of standing in contraposition to society, naming and smashing the racial, economic, and political idols that seduce and delude.In this anthology Campbell diagnoses a problem afflicting much of the church today. Zealous to make a difference in the world by acquiring the power of legislation and enforcement, Christians employ society's political science rather than the scandalous politics of Jesus. Although well-intentioned, Christians are, Campbell laments, mistakenly up to our steeples in politics. Campbell's prescription is for disciples simply to incarnate the reconciliation that Christ has achieved. Rather than crafting savvy strategies and public policies, Do nothing, Campbell counsels. Be reconciled!Yet his encouragement to do nothing is no endorsement of passivity or apolitical withdrawal. Rather, Campbell calls for disciples to give their lives in irrepressible resistance against all principalities and powers that would impede or deny our reconciliation in Christ--an unrelenting prophetic challenge leveled especially at institutional churches, as well as Christian colleges and universities.In sermons, difficult-to-access journal articles, and archival manuscripts, Campbell then develops what reconciliation looks like. Being the church, for example, means identifying with, and advocating for, society's least one-including violent offenders, disenfranchised minorities, and even militant bigots. In fact, in Campbell's ordo the scorned sectarian and disinherited denizen is often closer to the peculiar Christian genius than are society's well-healed powerbrokers.Disciples seeking to discern their calling can hardly do better than taking direction from this bootleg, pulpitless preacher.

Resistance

A. To the Steeples

context: The church, for Campbell, can be not only an expression of our hope, but can also be a manifestation of our heresy. When authentically incarnating reconciliation, the motley, scandalous church can bring life to a divided world. When mimicking the politics of the principalities and powers, however, the institutional church is but another agent of division and death in the world. Campbell has, therefore, frequently written against the institutional church, precisely because he is for the anarchical church.

As seen in his writings on reconciliation, Will refuses to be classified with the “left” simply because he was against the “right” on matters of racial reconciliation. In the four pieces that follow, Campbell resists the progressive, liberal, mainstream, institutional church (i.e., “the steeples”). In particular he opposes the presumption that the only way the church can effectively suppress racism is either to align itself with humanitarian agencies and more stringently apply the wisdom of social science, or to acquire political power and more rigorously enforce U.S. constitutional law. The gist of Campbell’s diagnosis, in other words, is that liberal/progressive institutional churches are not particularly different from the conservative/racist ones. Both are “pagan” insofar as they trust politics and/or social science, rather that the Gospel, to achieve their understanding of the reconciled, beloved community.

Moreover, Campbell includes a notable warning. To the extent that Christians actually forego striving to be “relevant” and “influential,” and instead privilege the peculiar teachings of Christ over culture’s political and sociological sense, the church will no longer fit well anywhere in society. To play off a quote by Flannery O’Connor, “You will know the reconciling truth, and that reconciling truth will make you odd.” Such, however, is the social and political fate of a church resisting the principalities and powers.

16

“Heresy in Our Time”*

I do not happen to be among those who see the white Southerner as dishonest and insincere. Having lived all my life in the South, I know that there are many, many people who have not been touched by the recent growth of racial discrimination and prejudice. But of those who have been so influenced, I do not share the feeling that they do not honestly believe what they say. I further believe that many of the rabid racists sincerely believe that when they defend segregation they are defending the faith and are witnessing to the will of God.

When we consider that many of these have their reading materials limited to what some of the hate groups stuff in every mail box along the RFD and who have not heard other interpretations of various Scripture passages used to justify the position of the racist, then we can understand why this is so. Nothing could be more natural to such a person than to believe that if God had wanted the races to mix, he would not have made some of us white and some of us dark.

Now the Klan no longer exists in my community, but it has left its stamp in the minds and hearts of generations yet unborn. The White Councils will also be forgotten. But the seedlings they are planting will grow and thrive for a long, long time.

And what are these seedlings? They are essentially religious. Most of what is written and distributed by the White Councils today has a religious theme. Their sermons have a text, poem, and three points, and nothing could be more heretical than this. They are packed with Scripture, so persuasive to the region not ashamed to call itself the Bible Belt.

And because the stamps of his culture have become a part of his religious heritage, it is next to impossible to reach him. If the segregationist said, “Down with God and away with Jesus Christ,” the job of the church would be cut out. The myriad missionary boards and organizations could begin to function and home missions would go into action and this great evil would be recognized and stamped out in our time. But when he says it is in defense of the faith and in the name of God that he is determined to keep the races apart, the churches in Protestantism are virtually helpless. We can tell the “Black Monday” enthusiasts [anti-Brown v. Board segregationists] to pray and they reply that they have prayed all night. We can remind him of the world of the Holy Spirit and he reminds us that Protestantism teaches that every man has direct access to God. We can quote him Scripture and before we can add “even the devil uses Scripture” he has said it to us. We can point him to statements of his denomination, convention, conference, or assembly and he says we believe in the autonomy of the local congregation. . . .

I agree that the Christian faith can be changed at many points that would make it more to my liking, more easily acceptable, more in keeping with my culture and my way of life; but the question we much always ask, “Is it Christian when we have finished with it?”

This you see is what has made heresy so serious in the Christian church throughout its history. It is not that people will say, “I don’t like what the church says even if it is right, so I will not believe it and follow it.” Rather it is that people insist that the changes they make are actually an improvement. It may be a matter of expediency to meet a given crisis situation and we say, “We will take this bit out of the church and put something else in its place, but just until the crisis is over and then we will go back to the original doctrine.”

Professor William Muehl has said,

Until the present generation, the church has regarded heresy as a far worse evil than theft, murder, or adultery. The heretic has been shunned and persecuted for more diligently than the most brutal criminal. And for what seems to me an excellent reason. The crimes of desperation and passion have a way of lashing back upon their perpetrator in such a way as to create moods of self-accusations and guilt in which redemption is more than ordinarily possible. Far from escaping the judgment of his fate, the murderer finds himself sucked by conscience into the very vortex of its power. The breach of God’s love more often than not increases one’s awareness of God’s presence in an almost geometric ratio. But the heretic, here is a far different case. The heretic’s great danger to himself and to those about him is that in the name of God he begins to move out of the more immediate presence of God. Heresy, far from creating its own self-destroying sense of guilt, more often than not, develops a protective pride. It stops the ears of remorse, it closes the eyes of penitence. It chokes the voice of conscience.

If the racists would say, “We don’t care what God thinks, we want segregation and will have it forever,” there would be some hope. Instead they say, “We want segregation because it is God’s will.” And to deny God in the name of God is heresy.

Agreeing that we might be able to improve the Christian faith, to make it more savoring and agreeable to the taste, we must also recognize that there is only so much we can do before we have done too much. If enough of that which is un-Christian is added to the Christian church, it becomes something other than the Christian church, no matter what we call it and no matter how loudly we proclaim that we have the inside tract on the voice of God and we have actually made a stark improvement on the faith. No matter how faithful our attendance, no matter how many gold stars we pass out—no matter our feasts, assemblies, and burnt offerings. . . .

The heretic of our day is not one to challenge the accepted number of angels that will go on the point of a needle. Here is not a concern of whether Jesus was of the essence or substance of God the Father. He does not care about the circumference of the throat of the whale that swallowed Jonah, nor even where Cain got his wife. No, he has outgrown these childish and primitive concerns. He, in the name of God, proves that this country belongs to the white man. He, in the name of faith, defends the doctrine of white supremacy. He, with the Bible in hand, and chapter and verse on his lips, shows that people with dark skin are less than children of God. In the name of God, he denies the brotherhood of man. In the name of God, he denies our responsibility to our neighbors if they happen to be beyond our own man-made boundaries, or have skin of a different color. In the name of God, he denies the love and mercy and justice of God.

And herein lies the duty of the church. For the church to let the doctrine of white supremacy dominate our culture (and it still dominates it in every section of the land, not just my native South), this is a tragedy. But for the church to permit this to be done in the name of the church, in the name of God, in the name of Christ who redeemed us and to whom the church belongs—this is heresy and a heresy such as Protestantism has never had to deal before. . . .

Who would deny the demands which our culture makes upon us? Yet we must ever be careful that we do not completely identify our religion with our culture. How easy it might have been for the early Christians to put just a little pinch of incense on the altar and thereby save their lives, recognizing the supreme sovereignty of the state so that they would be around later to do good. But they did not. “We must obey God rather than man,” they said. How simple it would have been for Elijah to have bowed to Baal. Instead he proclaimed the faith of Yahweh, “How long will you go on limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him, but if Baal then follow him.”

I cannot deny that too often I put the incense on the altar and give my allegiance to some sovereignty other than God. I cannot deny that too often I bow to Baal. Daily I do it. Status affords a certain amount of privilege and comfort. The demands are too much for us! The demands to conform, to do as others do. And we cannot get away from this relationship of man to man. But there is also the relationship of man to his God—the scandalizing, uncompromising demands of God. The words of Peter, “We must obey God rather than man. He is our only sovereign, He is our God, Him will we serve.”

A man whom we worship and seek to serve, some two thousand years ago discovered that the intersection of the demands of this world and the demands of his Father formed a cross, and at this intersection he died. How much of his life and teachings and death and resurrection can we deny and still call ourselves the church? How much that is alien...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Introit
• Reconciliation
• Resistance