The Moral Vision of the New Testament

 

I’ve just completed Richard Hays’ remarkable work, The Moral Vision of the New Testament.  The claim on the back cover is true: this book isn’t just a breath of fresh air, it’s a hurricane blowing away the fog of half-understood pseudo-morality and fashionable compromise to reveal instead the early Christian vision of true humanness and genuine holiness.

Hays reveals a unified, very challenging, solidly New Testament-based ethic for modern man focused on the themes of “cross”, “community” and “new creation”.  One of the book’s strengths is the way Hays outlines his hermeneutical approach.  Although one may not agree with all the particulars, his handling of such issues as divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and violence merit careful reflection.  I found his undermining of the “just war” theory particularly convicting and convincing.

As might be expected from someone on the faculty of Duke Divinity School, he makes statements regarding the inerrancy of Scripture that more conservative Christians (including myself) would quibble with.  Oddly, the actual authority he grants a priori to the New Testament text in terms of letting it shape his ethics is something many a more ideologically-driven American Evangelical would do well to emulate.

Iraq: No Price too High!

   The situation in Iraq would make a stone weep.

   Churches and mosques, traditionally places of refuge, are callously set ablaze.  Acid-filled tankers explode in poor neighborhoods, cruelly blinding innocent passers-by, burning out their lungs.  The other day a bomb killed a bunch of kids playing soccer.  Were they Sunnis or Shi’ites?  They were just kids… 

   Nothing, no-one is sacred.  Both Sunnis and Shi’ites post videos of their brazen atrocities on the internet.

   America is rightly blamed for the fiasco.  If it hadn’t invaded the country on trumped-up charges, history would have taken a different turn.

   But just blaming America is too simplistic.  Those who target worshipers at prayer, shoppers in a market, and children playing soccer are also guilty.

   Civil wars are always messy affairs, but the religious dimension makes this one particularly brutal:  “Shi’ite?  You’re dead!”  “Sunni?  Off with your head!”

   Meanwhile, both sides try to convince the rest of us that Islam is a religion of peace.  Little wonder the faith has an image problem…

   The occupation forces suffer least in all this.  Local warlords realize that the Americans and their dwindling allies will not hang around indefinitely.  The real enemy is the rival religious group.  It must be browbeaten, eliminated as much as possible before the occupation leaves.

   Saddam failed to create a cohesive nation state; he managed, by force and fear, to keep the various religious and ethnic groups from devouring each other.  By removing him the Americans opened a Pandora’s Box; they have no idea how to put the genies back in and clamp the lid back on.  They’re not even trying—they’re talking “exit strategy”.

   Everyone decent person in Iraq is a loser.

   Every decent person?  I recently read a report on the increased interest in Christianity among ordinary Iraqis of all sects.  More Christian literature is distributed than ever before, and more people are writing to Christian websites, TV stations, etc.  As happened in Iran, as happened in the Kurdish North of Iraq subsequent to the 1991 Gulf War, as has happened so often in the course of church history, a sovereign God will go to any length and pay any price in terms of human or divine suffering to draw those on whom He has set His favor to Himself.

   In Christ there is neither Shi’ite nor Sunni.  The good news coming from Iraq is that a church of mixed Muslim background believers is slowly emerging.   And that, in the divine economy of things, is worth the price.

Send Some Rogues!

There is a myth among Christians working cross-culturally that there is a spiritual element to language learning.  Just because someone is born-again, meek, child-like, humble, full of faith, love and hope, and a Christian to boot doesn’t make them better language learners.  Nor do the meek and the mild necessarily relate better to their host culture; in fact, the opposite tends to be true!  Oddly, being a Charismatic doesn’t help either–in fact, it seems to work against you on both counts…

 

Furthermore, the American Christians’ anachronistic and increasingly ludicrous sense of their own cultural/political superiority (the old “beacon on a hill” nonsense) leads both to a deep resistance to adapt, and to an innate desire to recreate the rest of the world in their own image: witness the almost irrepressible urge to establish “Christian” grade- and high schools running typical American curriculums wherever monied American missionaries gather in groups of two or three.  The damage such schools have done to the work of Christ in the Middle East in incalculable.

 

The best language learners I know are adventurous rogues.  During the 1991 Gulf War I worked as a translator for several secular organizations.  While operating in those circles I was amazed time and again by the number of people (real rogues some of them) I met who had a thorough grasp of one or more of the region’s languages.  They included diplomats, relief workers, sociologists, journalists, businessmen, soldiers and, of course, translators.  Interestingly, many of them were not even permanent residents, thought their work often took them to the Middle East.

 

It is, of course, impossible to a statistical comparison with such an amorphous group.  I did begin to wonder, however, why some of them were just so good.  One of the conclusions I came to was that these adventurous rogues were not hampered by the conservative-evangelical socio-political baggage and Christian morality of the large, linguistically-struggling missionary community.  Some of the rogues had national wives, and many of them had local girlfriends, even when they had wives back home.  They all seemed to enjoy drinking, partying, and holidaying with national colleagues.  Some had local gay partners.  All seemed quite willing to risk puking out their guts, just to try some dodgy-looking food or drink.  They weren’t into “contextualization”, they were into the adventure of it, into experiencing it all for the experience of it.  Some of them took amazing risks.  At one stage I shared a room in Northern Iraq with Dr. Martin van Bruinessen, the author of Agha, Sheikh and State (a definitive work on the Kurds), a real adventurer and a brilliant linguist.  I asked him once what motivatived him.  “I’m an existentialist”, he said.  “The experience justifies itself”.

 

Although I’m not promoting existentialism or my former colleagues colorful life-styles,  I do wonder if Christian agencies should, at a more sanctified level, stimulate a sense of adventure, a “drive to experience” in their personnel.    How can they encourage their folk to push deeper, to press on till it hurts, to take it on board, to kiss their own culture goodbye for a season, to master the language, to relish the experience?

 

If they cannot do that, can they at least teach their people to be less prickly, less defensive when Christianity, the Bible, Bush, or his foreign policies are criticized?  Could they, maybe, teach them to laugh, shrug and hug?  Maybe, just maybe, they can help their personnel recognize real from misplaced guilt, thus enabling them to enjoy fullness of life in another dimension, and make real friends in the process.  That, you see, is the one thing my rogue colleagues have in common: they have local friends, not just “contacts”;  their own social needs are met, in large part, by nationals.

YouTube and “Love It or Leave It”

A popular slogan here is “Turkey: Love It or Leave It!”  That actually means: “If you don’t love Turkey they way we do, then leave it!”   This is nasty, ugly nationalism.  It presumes you’ve got to prove your love and commitment to the country in their way before you are free to say anything about it.

     The “Love It or Leave It” crowd organizes itself into “dernekler” (associations) like the Türkçü Toplumcu Budun ve Elbiriği Derneği (Turkish Collectivist People and Cooperative Association) and the Kuvayi Milli Dernegi (Nationalist Forces Association).  They make their vows on Turkish flags, Qur’ans, and pistols, and publish racist magazines like “İlteriş”.  Their ideology is a mixture of Shamanism, Islam and Fascism.  They are allergic to minorities, notably Kurds: Kurds must not be accepted into the civil service, should not be allowed to own property, and must not be accepted into universities.  Their breeding habits should be restricted.  If a Kurd marries a Turk the family’s bloodlines can only be purified by marrying Turkish for 5 generations (see Radikal 18 Feb. 2007).  It all has a rather pathetic, 1930s German ring to it.

     No Turk need prove his/her nationalist credentials.  A people that successfully ran an empire for centuries, fought a thrilling War of Independence, and in recent decades built a regional economic and military power need not feel insecure, need not fear coming to grips with its past.  In fact, it must do so if it wants to continue developing in healthy ways.

     This the Nobel winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk grasped.  He tried, ever so gently, to nudge his people towards a self-image that had integrity.  Sadly, Pamuk moved to the States recently.  His vision differed from the “Love It or Leave It” crowd; since they will kill their opponents, he took their threats seriously.

     The “Love It or Leave It” crowd is not interested in the unsolicited advice of the likes of me, a Christian and a foreigner… There are, however, some here who consider me a friend; in normal, healthy relationships, the opinion of friends matters. 

     This is what I’m hoping and praying and praying for:

     1. that Turkey will become a member of the European Union sooner rather than later.  I believe that will lead to both economic development and a healthier, more open society.

     2. that “love it or leave it” attitudes metamorphose into healthy, non-racists patriotism which embraces all citizens and seeks a better society for all—a society not based on racist or religious ideology but on contemporary Northern European liberal democratic principles.

     3. that the notion of freedom of expression and religion would be wholeheartedly embraced. 

     That last point is, I believe, the key.  Everything else will flow from it.  When nationalism and religion cease being prisons, when people are free to think outside prescribed boxes, then this society will, I am convinced, surge forward in new, challenging, and dynamic ways.  I hope I live long enough to see it!

     Hope is the substance of things not seen–we are certainly seeing the opposite of what we hope for.  The recent closure of YouTube in Turkey because “The State” didn’t approve of some Greek louts’ opinion of Turkey is an indication of much that is wrong: an over-sensitive nationalism overcompensating for a poor national self-image.

Great language learning site

Here is the link to the Foreign Service Institute’s language learning site:

http://fsi-language-courses.com/

It contains complete language courses, including audio, in a whole host of languages (including Turkish and Arabic) available on-line.

Why does Islam figure in so many of the world’s trouble spots today?

Middle Eastern languages make liberal use of the world “God” (Allah) in ordinary speech.  Pick up an Arabic or Turkish dictionary and there are columns of mostly positive idioms which incorporate the word God.  Unlike English, the word is usually used to bless, not to curse.

 

It thus seems strange that societies which continually invoke God with respect to every aspect of life are, today, among the world’s most violent.  Most trouble spots today involve Muslims killing each other: Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon, Somalia…  Alongside such troubled nation states supra-national organizations claiming to speak for Islam such as Al-Qaida, the Taliban, and Hizbullah add to the impression that Islam and violence go together.

 

The typical Muslim response to this observation is to blame the West: colonialism, foreign intervention (British, French, and American), the state of Israel, Free Masons, Christian missionaries, etc. etc.  Blaming everything on outsiders does not, however, solve anything; it merely underscored the impression that foreigners are strong, and Muslims weak.  Such defeatism prevents these societies from looking their problems squarely in the face and dealing with them pragmatically.

 

Most other parts of the developing world have managed to come to terms with such scars as they inherited from their 19^th and early 20^th century interaction with the West, and get on with life.  They have integrated into the world economy and are focused on bettering the life of their citizens.

 

The rest of the world, however, is not shackled by a concept of God which seeks social renewal through the imposition of law (sharia).   In contradistinction, Christianity’s God condemns this world altogether.  Instead of focusing on the reformation of society He calls people to form grass-roots, counter-cultural communities in which the world’s hurt and marginalized can find grace and hope.  This allows society to develop naturally, while it allows the church to exercise a humanizing effect in whatever kind of society it happens to finds itself.