Back to the Program'"The Righteousness of God" and Hurricane Mitch'
A ResponseI didn't know what to expect when I took on this assignment and awaited the paper by Mark Baker & Ross Wagner with some trepidation. I guess it is because there's something impertinent about an outsider to such a disaster, like me, trying to offer a theological rationale to those who have suffered from it. If called upon to make theological sense of hurricane Mitch to the Hondurans I would have to listen long and hard before I ventured to say anything at all.
So when the paper arrived my first reaction was one of relief. Relief that it was not a case of non-Hondurans coming along and trying to provide poor Honduran Christians with some biblical sticks and theological sheets to patch their shattered faith. My second reaction was one of admiration at the way the Amor Fe y Vida Church members, who had themselves suffered severely from the hurricane, were handling the disaster theologically.
I confess also to be excited by the fact that they found 'the righteousness of God' such a positive theologoumenon in their attempt to understand what had happened theologically. If I have grasped the history of the Amor Fe y Vida church aright, they had already parted from the more established evangelical churches of the region because the latter understood the gospel in too individualistic and legalistic terms. The Amor Fe y Vida leaders had already concluded that the gospel was more holistic, with horizontal and social ramifications as well as vertical and spiritual ones. They were already turning away from the image of God as one who stood at the top of the social pyramid enforcing his law rigorously on all those at the bottom of the pile. In other words, they had already made Luther's discovery that 'the righteousness of God' is not to be understood primarily in terms of an angry God punishing those who offend him. But they had made that discovery in social terms and not simply in terms of personal salvation.
If I have that right, it means that the Amor Fe y Vida leaders had already made the breakthrough of understanding 'righteousness/justice' in relational terms and 'the righteousness of God' in terms of concern for the poor. Personally I don't attribute the grasp of righteousness as a relational term to 'the new perspective on Paul'; it is an insight with much deeper and longer roots; Hermann Cremer's Die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre im Zusammenhange ihrer geschichtlichen Voraussetizungen (21900) is usually given prime credit. And in some disagreement with Ross Wagner, I would remind him that an emphasis on a creational dimension of God's righteousness is particularly associated with the work of Ernst Käsemann and Peter Stuhlmacher on the subject: God's righteousness denoting his faithfulness as the Creator to his creation. It may be truer, however, to say that 'the new perspective' has helped to liberate the social, national and racial dimensions of Cremer's insight into righteousness as relational in character. But if that is the case, then I would have been very interested to hear more about how the Hondurans had first arrived at that insight, since it seems to have been that prior insight which enabled them to read Romans in such a positive way in relation to hurricane Mitch.
Their reading of Romans 1 is not particularly highlighted in the paper, but seems to underlie their attempt to correlate 'the justice of God' with hurricane Mitch (p.9) - the understanding that God 'allows'/'permits' human sin to work out its consequences. Paul did not consider natural disasters in his indictment of Rom. 1.18-32, but we should not think of the sins he does indict - idolatry and inappropriate sexual activity - as lacking in social dimensions. And his final examples in Rom. 1.28-31 can certainly be characterized in terms of society gone wrong - 'jealousy, murder, rivalry, deceit, spite, rumour-mongers, slanderers . . . senseless, faithless, loveless, merciless' (1.29-31). When Rom. 8 is also taken into consideration, the portrayal of creation as subject to futility and decay can be fitted into the Rom. 1.18-32 schema without difficulty - the extent to which natural disasters are one of the consequences of irresponsible stewardship of the natural world. The significant feature is the very different corollary which can be drawn. The portrayal of God as one who punishes sin with natural disasters evokes the picture of a frightening God who needs to be appeased by repentance and a more strictly ruled personal conduct - as presumably in the larger evangelical churches of the region. The portrayal of God as one who has created a moral universe, where human freedom to sin includes the unrestricted outworkings of the consequences of human greed, encourages rather a concern to identify social sin as sin, to limit its effects and to help those suffering from its consequences - that is, a politically activist agenda and not simply a personal spiritual discipline. Such a reading, it seems to me, makes much better sense of an understanding of God's justice in Romans as it bifurcates into God's wrath on the one hand and into his saving righteousness on the other.
The new element which seems to have come in through the Amor Fe y Vida church's re-reading of Romans is that of God's righteousness as covenant faithfulness. This again is Luther's insight - that God's righteousness draws the sinner back to himself, not simply demands the sinner's punishment. But it is Luther tweaked by the new perspective to bring out the national and social dimensions of righteousness as faithfulness. The concept of God's faithfulness to those he has chosen has, of course, other corollaries which pose equally hard questions of theodicy - particularly, what about the justice of God in regard to those he has not chosen. It would have been good, had it been appropriate, to listen in to how the Amor Fe y Vida Christians handle Romans 9-11. But at least the concept of God's faithfulness enables a more positive theological response to disaster than that of the angry God administering punishment. For the history of the people of God is littered with disasters, and the affirmation of God's continuing faithfulness to his people, despite their sin and failures, can provide a tremendous assurance and reinvigoration to faith under threat. Such assurance can of course be misplaced, as Romans 2 reminds us; here again it would have been interesting to hear how the Honduran Christians handle that chapter. And the question of whether assurance of God's faithfulness is sufficient to cope with a disaster like the Holocaust is, once again, a question which only those who have experienced the Holocaust can answer. But at least in the case of hurricane Mitch it is both humbling and heartening to see how positively constructive the understanding of God's righteousness as coterminous with his faithfulness has been for the Amor Fe y Vida church members.
Ross Wagner also notes that the Honduran Christians had not picked up on another aspect of the new perspective - on Jewish/Christian relations. As he points out, this is hardly surprising in view of the lack of Jewish presence in Honduras. But it reminds us that the Holocaust is a particularly European issue. It has impacted on European theology and the theology of the traditional denominations because it made us conscious of the dark strand of anti-semitism which runs through European church history. In recoiling against the legalistic stereotype of Judaism which had so besmirched our history and misled our exegesis of the NT, we rediscovered dimensions of justification by faith which had been lost to sight. What is interesting for me is that the Hondurans seem to have perceived these dimensions of God's righteousness without the stimulus of the Holocaust. In consequence, they may have missed out on the corollaries for Jewish/Christian relations. But their recognition that God's righteousness includes his concern for the poor is derived directly from Christianity's Jewish heritage in the scriptures of Israel (the OT). So we could say that the new perspective insight, that Israel's identity feeds into and is integral to Christianity's identity, is implicit. Still, it would be interesting to see how Amor Fe y Vida handle the idea of the Christian OT as Jewish scripture.
Another question which came to mind was how the Hondurans handle those scriptures which seem to envisage natural disasters as willed by God and used by God to discipline or punish his people. We need only think, for example, of the plagues of Egypt (Ex. 7-10), or the fiery serpents in the wilderness (Num. 21), or the droughts and pestilence of which Amos 4 speaks, not to mention the fearful visions of Revelation 9. Now of course, the Baker-Wagner project was a limited one, and fascinating enough in itself, without expecting the Amor Fe y Vida church leaders to wrestle with all the issues thrown up by NT theology. But it does remind us that there are further dimensions to the subject of God's righteousness as presented in the biblical tradition, and that we must beware lest the new perspective become as blind as the old to important facets of that witness.
One last issue was whether a more radical reading of Romans would have provided any further insight or inspiration for the Hondurans. I have in mind John Draper's edition of Bishop Colenso's treatment of Romans in 19th century Natal. In that, if I recall aright, Colenso read the Jew/Greek dialectic of the letter in terms of the situation of his own day - the British colonial power represented by the 'Jew', the Zulus by the Greeks. Apart from its shock value, the treatment raises the central hermeneutical issue of the extent to which there are repeating patterns of relationships between a traditional society which sees itself as superior and a local society marginalized by the system controlled by the superior. And whether Paul's indictment of Jew first but also Greek can be transposed to such other situations in other periods and places.
My final thought is one of renewed admiration for the way the Honduran Christians have been open to the text of Paul's letter to Rome, to hear it as God's Word addressed to them, to be instructed by it, and to draw from it encouragement in the face of disaster and practical action in the face of the indifference of the powerful.
James D. G. Dunn
University of Durham
October, 2000
Response to Baker & Wagner - 10/00 - p. 1