Jesus’ Call to Christian Discipleship a Call to Christian Identity?
I recently had lunch with the minister who pastors the church I grew up in. We sat down to dialogue about the work we are doing in the community. In contrast to my own efforts, over the past year he has been steering his congregation toward a vision of Islam that defines the tradition and all who inhabit it as an irredeemable danger to Christians, religious freedom, and America herself. In addition, he has invited anti-Muslim groups into his church to hold workshops and conferences that spread this message to the outlying community. In step with Bill French, founder of the for-profit Center for the Study of Political Islam, my old pastor insists that as an oppressive political force that has been secretly infiltrating seats of power in America, Islam seeks to enslave all non-Muslims.[1]
For those like him, the battle lines have been clearly drawn as a war between Christianity (read America) and Islam. He admits, “I have no problem with Buddhism or Judaism or any other religion, and three or four years ago, I would do the Christian thing and support the Muslim religion’s right to practice freely in America. But we can no longer afford to let this happen.” While I applaud his seeming tolerance toward non-Muslim religious others (they are less of a numerical threat to the supremacy of Christianity), Im not sure that supporting our Muslim neighbor’s efforts to seek the divine should have anything to do with our legal responsibility to do so, let alone serve to confirm or define our identity as Christians…or Americans. I find it interesting that this pastor believes that such support is a sign of one’s identity as a member of the Christian Tradition. But is it, and if so, why would he willingly refuse to perform? There are a great many directions I could take this, but I will try to limit myself.
Expounding on my analysis of the Mission of Jesus, I feel it imperative that we explore in greater depth Jesus’ criteria for discipleship if we are to respond to the identity question. Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. [2] Concerning this command, Joanna Dewey argues that the “modern Western”[3] reader is prone to misinterpret Jesus’ words as commanding Christians to “wipe out any sense of self,”[4] and in so doing, sacrifice her/his unique identity. However, to do so, she insists, is to adopt both “a fundamental misreading of the Gospel,”[5] as well as an ill appropriated understanding of Christian discipleship in the context of the in-breaking of God’s Reign of Radical Kenotic Love. Christians are to suppress the ego-centered self so that the God-centered self might take priority. John the Baptist illustrates this dynamic beautifully when he says, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”[6]
Still more importantly, concerning Jesus’ call for disciples to ‘“deny themselves,’” Dewey argues rightly that while “today many […] tend to read it as denial of the individual self,”[7] the Markan audience, however, would have understood “the basic unit of society […] not [as] the individual person [,] but the multigenerational kinship group.”[8] In this way, one is a true disciple if one is willing, as Dewey points out, to leave ‘“house or brothers or sisters or a mother or a father or children or fields for’”[9] the Reign of Radical Kenotic Love.
Indeed, to be crucified with Christ,[10] does not mean “to wipe out any sense of self,”[11] as is Dewey’s concern, but to forgo one’s ego-centered self interests for the ultimate benefit of the whole. Furthermore, it is my contention that the call to “renounce one’s kinship group,”[12] as Dewey has put it, is tantamount to forsaking the human tendency towards tribalism of any sort. This is of particular import to the early Jesus movement around the issues of religion, race, gender, and class: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”[13] John Thatamanil labels all such identity distinctions as “marked identities” and he defines them as “sight[s] of conflict and power.”[14] In contrast, “An unmarked identity is of no particular significance for the way we organize our lives.”[15] He goes on to explain that “marked identities” can become “fraught identities”[16] if and when they begin to function for societal structures as a means by which to rate certain identities as being essentially better than others. For example, race has long functioned as a marked identity in America, because those in the social power majority deemed racial identities characterized by greater levels of melanin content to be “fraught identities.”
In much the same way, Thatamanil argues that “Religious identities have become a terrain of battle in our time, especially […] since 911.”[17] As a result, “where you can build your house of worship or not is now a fraught issue.”[18] In particular, “if your community bears the brand Muslim, now the possibilities for where you can do so have become limited.”[19] In the context of our shared life together, religious peoples should be made to feel enhanced by the presence of the religious other, which demands that we resist the impulse to create uniformity whenever we encounter identities that society has branded marked. For this reason, Thatamanil is right to argue that,
The really deep categories that should shape our Christian identities should be things like child of God and neighbor […] stranger, [and] immigrant. [And consequently] the practices that should shape our life are hospitality and love of neighbor. We imagine a community where all are gathered. [One] that mirrors our hope for the kingdom of God, a peaceable community where difference is celebrated but never made into a fetish that so deeply marks who we think we are that it prevents us from forming community with people who bear other identities—very different identities. Something about the Christian life is supposed to relativize [but] not erase the power of identities that the world creates and would have us govern our lives. Christians are supposed to be people who are deeply suspicious by the way the world divides us against each other.[20]
One’s commitment to Christian discipleship is thus undergirded by the practice of radical kenotic love for one’s neighbor. In this way, love is the identity with which we should concern ourselves most. As Thatamanil contends, the self-emptying nature of the Christian life is itself, “already something that undercuts identity.”[21] Jesus teaches us to let love be the marker that guides us into right relationship with our neighbors, Christian and non-Christian. And so, I maintain that Jesus sought to nurture the formation of religious identities that would bring individuals closer to their religious neighbors, not create greater separation from them. Thataminal agrees when he says, “the trajectory of the Christian life requires us to move toward our neighbor in love in order to move towards God in holiness.”[22] Additionally, he so plainly and yet so profoundly states, “The point of the Christian life is not to be Christian,”[23] but to move into the divine life.
[1] The Sothern Poverty Law Center has an interesting article on Anti-Muslim leaders in Middle Tennessee. http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2011/summer/the-anti-muslim-inner-circle
[2] Mark 8.34
[3] Joanna Dewey, “‘Let Them Renounce Themselves and Take Up their Cross’: A Feminist Reading of Mark 8.34 in Mark’s Social and Narrative World,” (FCNT), 23.
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] John 3.30
[7] 33
[8] Ibid
[9] Mark 10.29
[10] “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2.20).
[11] 23
[12] 34
[13] Galatians 3.28
[14] John Thatamanil, “Living Peacefully in a Multi-Religious World”, (St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, Nashville TN, Four Week Series. November, 7, 14, 21, and December 5).
[15] Ibid
[16] Ibid
[17] Ibid
[18] Ibid
[19] Ibid
[20] Ibid
[21] Ibid
[22] Ibid
[23] Ibid
