When Jesus clears out the Temple in John 2, he presents a vision for the reformation of God’s house. As questions about guns in churches are raised once again in America, this vision is one to which we must attend.
It is the crucified Christ who sends us out to his sisters and brothers who are being crucified by the powers-that-be every day. Are we willing to do what Jesus requires and die in the process? Or will we deny Jesus in order to save ourselves?
Given the magnitude of the challenges we face the task of resistance remains a communal, provisional, necessarily (ie meaningfully) contradictory, broken labour shared between sites of theory and practice.
I do not know what political theology ideally ought to be. But I do know that, minimally, it should not be cruel.
Hyperpartisanship is not, as naive commentators said in the early 1980s about cocaine, a “harmless, recreational drug.” We need to stop snorting our lines of political cocaine, sober up, stop demonizing the “other”, and start listening to each other.
God brings his judgment in and as the light, providing us with a pattern for human justice.
For Christians resistance must mean re-anarchizing Christianity, that is, imagining the church as a different kind of political body that transgresses national and racial and class borders in creative ways.
I suspect that, until the character of our culture has changed, individual apologies will continue to be insufficient and inadequate.
Sometimes effective resistance necessitates speech or decisive direct action. Yet sometimes resistance also demands a tactical silence.