I know I’m behind the bandwagon with reading Jesus For President by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. I guess I didn’t get the memo that being Emergent was cool. Ok, so maybe Claiborne et. al. doesn’t perfectly fit the Emergent mold, but its close enough and Parker sure thinks it does. (zing!)

Regardless, I always metaphorically kick myself when I remember the many thought processes I go through and exercises of the mind that I experience in reading books. Nothing gives a better feeling and suppresses concerns of heresy and madness¹ more than reading the ideas you’ve had in the work of others. (only much more accurately articulated) I feel more led to conversation and discussion of these ideas than almost anything in life and this is where blogging comes in.

The entire reason I started blogging in the first place was to share this journey. As humans, we are fools if we see this life as a means to an end. Life is about the daily love, not the self-indulgent reward of our idea of heaven. Am I a heretic yet? Suggesting that our purpose in life is not its resolution in heaven but rather the love we exhibit en route? 

Perhaps I should start counting heretical posts. This isn’t the first, but it is the first in which I claim heresy.²

Actually, I did write a post a couple weeks ago on which I worked until four in the morning. The post was basically about the falseness of one major premise on which we live our lives, the premise of expansion of any form of human institution. Government, the church, the economy, globalism, etc. It ties in to the God-Complex and our sub-conscious attempt to be like God, which in turn is the definition of Fallenness.

I suppose it would be unfair of me to not mention that my dive into Jesus For President isn’t without skepticism. I have a tendency to write what I think of books inside their front cover, just under my name and the month and year I read the book. Perhaps its my way of writing my in-the-moment perception of the book for the sake of memory. What I particularly wrote in the cover of JFP (even though I’m only 100 pages in) was that Shane and Chris provide all the arguments I’d hoped to hear. The ideas surrounding Christ and the truth about God’s intent and idealism have even given me hints of a place of truth that I always knew existed, but could never put a finger on. The kind of homely feeling where you know you’re in a place either physically or mentally where you belong. The kind of place you know exists deep within you but if you haven’t found it or haven’t been shown the way there, you proceed through life despite the empty feeling.

Anyway, what I wrote in the front cover was that thus far, the arguments all line up, but somewhere in the conclusions I still catch this bad taste of political negativism. Of course for those of you who know me, you know I come from the political right. My life has been defined by conservative values though always disturbed by the ignorance, arrogance, and un-love of the Evangelical movement and the self-absorption of the pro-capitalist movements.³ The bad taste I refer to comes primarily from what I can’t articulate beyond calling them “bad argumental methods” embedded within the writing that are defined as “bad argumental methods” because they accept the political premises of the left and attack the right with immaturity. I go so far as to call many of them false and immature because the lack of objectivism in those premises seems childish to me. Some of these premises include political mud-slinging, and suggesting the perpetuation and enlargement of a central welfare-state government, and what conservatives call Bush Derangement Syndrome. 

I can’t say decisively that this is the final conclusion Claiborne and Haw arrive at but its where I see them thus far. Spectacular arguments with a conclusion that was staring them right in the face while they couldn’t help but throw immature jabs at the Christian conservative right and continue to accept the naivete of bleeding-heart liberalism? That might be an extreme statement. Perhaps better to call it “99 out of 100″.

And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t in any way a post arguing the superiority of the right or the goodness of Christian patriotism. Argument tends towards rhetoric, and objectivism leads to truth. Real truth, not pretend truth. The conclusion I think Claiborne and Haw should arrive at (and hope they do) is the rejection of any and all political systems as being based on a false premise: the false premise of our God-Complex. What God was suggesting in his Old Testament direction of the Israelites and what Jesus was exemplifying in his perfect Love was a rejection of the way of humanity in favor of that of God’s.

As humans we build, organize, control, and dominate, all characteristics of an sub-conscious attempt to be like God. Read Genesis again to remember that our attempts to be like God is what defines us as Fallen. God told the people they didn’t want a king, yet they insisted, and Jesus told the Pharisees to “render unto Caesar”. Being in the world but not of the world is not properly illustrated by Christian Fundamentalism’s hijacked suggestion of legalism or gnostic-style-superiority via hidden messages but rather by the radical rejection of participation in power and the active pursuit of Love. God was saying “my way is better” and Jesus echoed with “let Caesar try to be God, you should just love”.

Wow, as I sit and think about that idea even now, I can’t fathom how big it is. Big.

I’ll try to explain more as I continue this book and continue to consider just how revolutionary Christ actually was.

This is the part where I claim heresy for the second time in one post. Actually you could consider it the second and third time, because I am suggesting the rejection of the politics of both left and right. I find it easy to call this heresy in considering the similarities in argument and practice shared by both left and right with dogmatic religion. That will be a conversation for another day.

The simplest hint of God’s suggestion of the rejection of human ways can be found in his use of the Least. God constantly used shepherds and prostitutes and tax collectors and the son of a carpenter from Galilee to do his bidding. People seen by human culture as <em>the Least</em>. God’s way was revolutionary from the start, its just that we as humans never catch on to that idea and in some cases, don’t want to.

Perhaps what I’m suggesting is that maybe the meek really are in the favor of the Lord. Doesn’t that make you want to be a member of the meek?

Footnotes: 

¹ “I realize I am not going mad or completely alone in my heretical thoughts” – Mike @ subversivechurch

² I should mention that the definition of heresy, at least the definition I go by is the challenging of religious belief, which is an extension of culture, not of true religious ideology. I am ok with claiming heresy because it is humanities interpretation of Christ that I disagree with, not Christ himself.

³ I am now independent, for those of you who are wondering. Not moderate, not “somewhere in the middle”, independent. As in, “floating somewhere up above the dense ignorance of a single-dimensional political spectrum”.

UPDATE: One of the guys with whom I discuss most of my ideas, Parker, had this quote from CS Lewis to add: “Satan tends to unleash falsehoods into the world in pairs, hoping to drive us to either one of two extremes, both of which are sinful in their own way.” Good thought.