Service, Attachment & the Big Three
Reconstruction from Power Part 2
Dear Aaron,
In my last letter I began laying the foundation for reconstructing the Christian life through the lens of the Apostle Paul, focusing on his personal transformation—from persecutor to persecuted to martyr. I highlighted that reconstruction, for Paul, is not simply a matter of belief [something measurable] but of rebuilding a life of love, faith, and hope, those three often discussed Christian virtues.
This letter will continue with addressing these three Christian virtues in light of a supplementary essay I wrote in the intervening weeks between letters. In our private discussions you questioned whether I would attempt to put an order to the virtues and I confess that I did make several attempts to do so and was convinced in the end to write Am I the A**hole in defence of not attempting to measure the immeasurable.
As we have been discussing, every sentence we write seems to be an unfolding of what we know, what we think we know and what we definitely do not know. I wrote the essay figure out what it was that I was saying. I will use the language that developed for this purpose.
In the Scriptures, love, faith and hope are qualities and not things to be quantified. We cannot have an indisputable quantity of the three virtues such that we can attach a number, order and a measure for how much we possess. The potency of even a little of any of them is made out to be the equivalent of possessing them entirely. A spec of faith moves mountains, a lack of love renders life completely untenable, hope exists as the leafing evidence of the mustard seed of faith. It seems to be all or nothing in the Scriptures.
But as I wrote Am I the A**hole, I came to another understanding of how it is that we speak about love, faith and hope as if they are things with amounts to be measured. We take from the qualifiable and give them quantifiable definitions so that we can say of the quantity we possess that it is qualifiably good. All we need are new, measurable definitions.
Is it any wonder that the definition of sin in the Scriptures is so often, “they called what was evil good and what was good they called evil”?
Isaiah 5:20 ESV
In 1st Corinthians 13, Paul avoids nuance and chooses a hot take, binary, all or nothing, ride or die stance on love, faith and hope. In my previous readings I read some of the passages as if he was talking concretely about these virtues. But when I read it again with the idea in mind that we cannot have love, faith or hope without having them entirely, it struck me as corresponding to the kind of language we read in 1st John, “if anyone says they love God and hates his brother, he is a liar”.
What if what Paul is saying is that the material, measurable things of this life are not an indication of the presence of faith, hope and love, and indeed if they are not present then the actions themselves are suspect? Think Ananias and Saphira who sold what they had and set in their hearts to lie to the Holy Spirit and say that they were giving the whole amount of their sale to the work of the ministry when in fact they were keeping a sum to themselves. The act itself betrayed the total lack of love.
This seems harsh to our modern minds. They sold their land and gave a portion to the poor—sure they lied, but they still gave and isn’t that an act of love?[1] Let’s take another example, this time from Paul Himself.
In Acts 16, Paul reactively casts out a demon from a servant girl who had been making her owners a good deal of money; we are told that she was a successful fortune teller. She follows Paul and Silas around prophesying exactly who they are and what they have come to do: she effectively put their ministry on the front page of the local newspaper and for thanks, her demon is cast out in a temper—no demon, no prophecy.
It makes me wonder if this servant girl wasn’t on Paul’s mind when he wrote,
“If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
It should not be lost on us that this scene which we receive from Luke in the book of Acts is very akin to occasions in the life of Jesus in which he regularly commanded people not tell who it was that healed them, and in Luke 4 how Jesus once rebuked multiple demons out of people for prophesying who He was and what He came to do.
We could also mention Simon Magus who attempted to buy the gift of the Holy Spirit or indeed, Caiaphas who even while he was planning the murder of the Messiah was prophesying the significance of one dying for the many, and so on and so forth.
All of this to say, as I am wont to, that a calculable, high functioning spiritual order in which we know what we believe, why we believe it, what to do and why to do it is not an indication of faithfulness either to God or the Scriptures as is often claimed. As our topic is reconstruction it is necessary to say what we are reconstructing and what it is not. Not a calculable, high functioning spiritual order, but a living breathing relationship with God.
God as Father
I want to move into a brief explanation of the process of attachment as I understand it and will begin with an illustration from my life. I am the primary attachment figure for one of my children. The preferential affection I see in her eyes, and the attention she lavishes on me, is the most potent drug imaginable. The more deeply she invests in our bond, the harder it becomes to resist her desire for total influence and control.
For my other child, her mother holds that primary place of attachment. And so, we find ourselves interceding for one another—and for the children most attached to us—to ensure that every voice is heard. So it is that personally I am the primary attachment for two members of our family; my wife and my youngest and my wife is the primary attachment for two members of our family; me and our eldest. I hold a secondary attachment to our eldest and my wife holds a secondary attachment to our youngest. I am laying this out in as childish of terms as I can because, of course, my wife and I do not prefer our primary attachments as we understand them to be parts of a larger whole of whom the four of us are one family—our children don’t grasp that concept quite yet and so they have a favourite parent whom they find more agreeable.
I bring up the concept of attachment because when we adults think about reconstruction we think about reconstructing the whole without considering the parts. We expect children to understand that they are part of a vast (to them) social construct called family and to behave preferentially to all members involved—instead they fight tooth and nail when their preferred adult is not there to intercede for them. The breakdown of this system is when any one family member is preferred above another to the exclusion of everyone else. So, when there is a breakdown of relationship among the family members, reconstruction looks like reconciliation of all people concerned and a return to family wide preferential treatment, forgetting the water that passes under the bridge. Let’s look at the inverse of what usually happens on an organisational level.
In the event of the breakdown of relationships in an organisation and the relative deconstruction from that organisation[2] there is usually no going back; no return to the lie that if we act preferentially towards the organisation and its goals, we will be safe, provided for, and legitimate in our standing. Conversely, Paul encourages a sense of self-abandonment in this regard—not towards the organization or Empire mind you, but as an indication that we see beyond what is being projected to the truth of it and acting with grace and deference.
Paul indicates this in his letter to the Phillipians:
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” Philippians 2:3 ESV
For those of us raised in the church there is a nursery rhyme quality to Paul’s words that renders them a bit meaningless, so allow me a paraphrase:
“Do nothing from self-preservation, anxious to protect your dignity; but in deference to others, adopt the posture of a servant.”
It’s important to remember that Paul is writing to individuals who are a part of the same community much the same way as a family—the command is not gendered, or preferential to leadership or to the weak, but a command to all to adopt the posture of a servant and the message is loud and clear: This is not your household, but it is your home.
Paul is saying that we are servants in the House of God, which is in us and built up by us through singular intersecting instances of preferential treatment. There is no safety, legitimacy or provision to be found in any organisation –leastwise the church—because who is it among us that is preferred above all such that it would become their household and whose responsibility it would be to protect, provide for, and legitimise? Paul does not put this onus on the church or else we would expect that he would have berated their leaders for not protecting one another from serious harm from the world.
Returning to our modern family unit, if anyone takes it upon themselves to claim sole ownership of the family and dictate what ought to be done apart from the agreement of the whole family, they are acting as if the other family members exist to fulfil their will, and in exchange they are afforded safety, legitimacy and provision without launching into a full on Frollo number berating Quasimodo for thinking about leaving the one place he is safe, legitimate and provided for.[3]
Paul’s admonition to the Philippians echoes Jesus’ commands in Matthew.
38“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic,h let him have your cloak as well. 41And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. -Matthew 5:38-42 ESV
These commands from Jesus are to people with relative dignity and status living in the Roman Empire where that dignity and status can be stripped away as quickly as being spotted on the road to Golgotha and told to carry the cross of a disgraced would-be King or common thief.
For our times, consider the threat of being accosted by Rome as the equivalent of being scooped up by ICE. Depending on the colour of your skin and the sound of your voice, the threat is more or less a real and present danger. But Jesus isn’t only talking of Rome here. There is a power differential in each example. The first three examples place the hearer on the low end of the Power differential and are prefaced by the one in power being evil. Examples include Being struck, being sued for an offence, being a forced pack animal for the Empire. The final example stands out because the power differential is shifted to one of power over another in which we are told to give to the beggar and lend to the needy who comes to us for a loan. The teaching is that when we turn the other cheek, give our shirt as well as our cloak and walk the extra mile we return good for evil—but much more than that. The teaching is against the practices of those who use power for violence, offence for litigious gain, and authority for coercion.
Paul’s sense of Jesus’ teaching here is in the first three examples of being under some form of power. We act in deference to what people say about themselves through the secondary interface; how they dress, walk, talk, and generally conduct themselves—we remove ourselves as much as possible from their paths, but when we inevitably meet, we care for them as our own selves.[4]
I will leave our discussion of Reconstructing from Power here for now, and continue next week with a discussion of abandoning the self, and how selfishness, while repugnant, is not the only idol we knock over in the pursuit of reconstruction.
For now I remain at your disposal,
Daniel
[1] Such is the definition of love as a verb when we transmute its quality to a quantity.
[2] where deconstruction can be understood to be a crisis of safety, legitimacy and provision.
[3] We could include Mother Gothel’s chilling, Mother Knows Best as well.[3]
[4] This may be what the disciples of John would say it means to be “in but not of” the world; paying deference to the world, but in making ourselves as servants we do not participate in the aggregation of power.
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