Zombie Ethics: Church and the Desire for Justness
Humans, Cultures, and the Slippery Pursuit of a Just World
A continuation of a brief series on the motif of the zombie, and how it helps illuminate the ways in which the moral life is overtaken by alien parties. Read the first installment here if you’ve not. Today, we examine a specific example: the desire for the church to be an agent of justice.1
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The Justice of God in an Unjust World: A Brief History
Once upon a time, there were churches for whom being just people was integrated into the fabric of what it is to be a follower of Jesus, in two ways.
They were a people of the Law: to be of this people was to live into the world which God gives through the Law and the prophets, through Psalms and proverbs, through examples of terrible kings and just ones. To be God’s people in this way was to not neglect either one’s personal piety or what one owed to one’s neighbor.
This people were the inheritors of God’s own justice: Jesus. To be the followers of God-in-the-flesh meant that the One who called for a just community in which all had what was needed, and in which there was recompense for when wrongs were done, had come in person. Jesus, the justice of God—making things right in and among us when we were yet uninterested in such things—sent the Holy Spirit to draw the nations into this world set right.
We find this dual vision—that to be the people of Jesus is to take up the moral vision of the Law, made possible by Jesus—embedded throughout early church writings. The poorly titled “On Christian Ethics” by St. Basil the Great of the 4th century is nothing but a compendium of citations from the New Testament on the moral life. The Didache, allegedly the “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” is a greatest hits of Old and New Testament moral teachings. To be of Jesus is to be the inheritor of the Big Picture of the moral life, which goes down to the origins of creation itself: if Jesus is the Word through whom all things exist, then the moral life, as given through Jesus, is to live with the grain of the universe itself.
Now: this looks straightforward, but don’t be confused—the early church, though clear on what the moral life looked like was under no illusion that it actually worked out this way. As most of the letters of the New Testament attest, this never went seamlessly, and so eventually, a question emerged: what happens when moral demands and worship are out of sync? How do we become the people God calls us to be?
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One form of this answer came in the form of the Donatists, a 4th century group who broke away from the Church, claiming that if the moral status of the one baptizing was in question, then the baptism was not legitimate. In a scandal-ridden age such as our own, this formulation is understandable: how can the work of the church not be implicated by the one doing the work? How can the teaching of one who has fallen mightily not be inflected with their own failures? The problem here is not that the Donatists were wrong on this count, but that they put too little stock in how grace works in us despite it all: the people are not abandoned by God in exile, and if the Corinthians get fifth chances, I can hope for even the Gothards.
Another form—much later, and for different reasons than the Donatists, I think—is that of the Social Gospel: that the work of the church is the work of ethics. This form, which has precedents long before the 20th century, began to rethink the nature of what we do in church through moral precepts: that to be the church and worship well, it has to have ethical import. Walter Rauschenbusch, the best known proponent, put it this way:
The social movement is one of the chief ways in which God is revealing that he lives and rules as a God that loves righteousness and hates iniquity. A theological God who has no interest in the conquest of justice and fraternity is not a Christian. It is not enough for theology to eliminate this or that autocratic trait. Its God must join the social movement. The real God has been in it long ago.2
Note the slipperiness here: ethical ideals (in this case, democracy) are out of in front of theological concepts, such that whatever God is, God has always been democratic. Rauschenbusch will elsewhere try to square this with the prophets, but the impulse I want to identify here is this: the way that the desire for a just world has become one with worship so as to dictate what worship looks like.
Both the Donatists and Social Gospel represent ways in which a desire for a just world comes to be the form of our theological confessions. But these both seem to me to be errors.
What I mean by this is that:
in the early church, the adoption of the Law as the basis for the moral life meant that the people of God were bound to something horribly out of date, but in continuity with what God had been doing prior to their existence. Whatever Christians innovated in the moral life always took its cues from what lay behind it.
that there is no golden age in which these commitments of Jesus as God’s justice and ourselves as Jesus’ people line up, and that the solution was not to try to update the vision of God (as with Rauschenbusch) or to anachronistically say that our priorities are those which have always been in view.
I take this, then, to mean a few things broadly for churches and this vocation to be God’s just people:
The moral life and our aspirations are generally out of joint, and it is a big part of the Christian life to know how to work with that frustration. “Getting it” never really works, because the reality is far more disappointing than the dream. It may even be the case that unfulfilled desire for something good pulls us in the right direction and makes us patient and amorous of the good.3
Things in flesh are never what they appear to be in theory. There is always one more wound to heal, because the church is a living organism capable of wounding and being wounded. Penitence and repair is a better way forward.
Theology, while consistently done in various contexts, cannot pretend to ever match its context, because cultures are always in the midst of change: church life will always be out of date. To assume that theology can match a culture is to assume that your culture is just a dead piece of meat waiting to be dissected, and that the Christian moral life is simply parsing words into policy instead of contemplating a living God.
TLDR: the desire for justice remains out in front as an object of desire, a cloud by day and fire by night. To catch it is to catch the golden calf that can never satisfy thirst nor feed us. The desire remains.
What To Do with the Pursuit of A Just Church?
As I argued in the first of this series, if there is a normed range of operation for bodies (in this case, the church body), the zombie is that body which is overtaken by some alien power for reasons which can’t be fully identified. The result is that a body finds itself under the sway of powers that it cannot fully identify. In this case, the body is overtaken not by an asteroid or a fungus, but by a perpetual idea: justice, when it should be concerned with something Ill just call justness.
To begin: I want to name what Christians can be concerned with “justness” instead of “justice”, to distinguish between the quality of the church’s relational life and the condition of the world which the church wants.
To desire for the church to live up to its own professed virtues is one thing, but the desire for the church to be perfected, in advance, toward society, in all its actions, is another.
Even the most ardent lover of the just God will say that the creation does not measure up to the maximal vision of justice. Without getting into the dynamics of whether or not “the arc of history” is a good thing for Christians to hang on to or not, the scope of what is meant by justice seems to be ultimately a wish for the flux of the world to be other than what it is.
If a world characterized by justice is a function of just relations, and people are those beings in constant motion—sometimes toward the good and sometimes away from it—justice remains a fleeting target. I strongly suspect that the frustration which emerges most of the time when churches fall short of their aspirations is not so much a frustration with church, but a frustration of this kind: that whatever justice we find in church is there, but in fleeting moments and inconsistently.
The hunger which a taste of justice produces, much like the zombie in search of brains, is that it frequently uproots not only that which should be uprooted, but the conditions which made the tastes of justice possible to begin with. To return to the Donatist’s complaint, the very bishops which they thought illegitimate were the same bishops who had baptized them, taught them Scripture, and catechized their children. The two can exist beside one another: that the things which came through them were true, and that the bishops were in need of correction.
By this, I mean that a just arrangement in the world is only enactable in part as a policy, a bit more in relational terms, and possibly most of all as virtues which people inhabit. But insofar as even virtues exist under the shadow of struggle, holding out for a fully just world as the only conceivable goal for the moral life seems like an invitation to never start. And so, unless we want to say that the goal for justice is something akin to a Christian-inspired vision maximally ruling over law and hearts,4 we need to focus on justness as a quality of gathered Christian life, expanding into the world as Christians scatter.
It is not wrong for to desire that the church follow its Lord, or that the vision of the lion and the lamb be made sight. It is right and good to rejoice when evil is undone and for the church to join its voice and feet here. The prayer which the Lord teaches us is of this kind: that the earth be like the heavens.
The persistent problem is this: a body—whether a singular human body or a body politic—is a thing in flux, and that in-flux-ness means that we have to get real comfortable with the ebb and flow within which the body rests. Time, the river in which the church exists, is sometimes full with rapids and sometimes dry, and the church suffers both the excesses and deficiencies. That a church would somehow maintain a certain quality of being despite these times is aspirational, but I think indebted more to a Stoic ideal than a Christian one. The Stoics were, among other things, famous for an indifference to time and circumstance; sheep who persist on water and grass are more vulnerable, and more inclined to bleat their laments when the shepherd seems slow on making good on promises.
As such, we do find signs of the prayer coming true: Rauschenbusch was not wrong to point toward labor unions, labor laws, and increased care for workers as signs of the coming kingdom. The problem comes when these become the aspired-for vision of justice, forgetting that these rest upon a continually renewed polity which is always forgetting its way, and into which are always being born a new generation of young ‘uns who have never heard of Moses or Jesus, much less justice.
A Pursuit of Justness: A Modest Proposal
I can hear the objection even as I write this: the point of justice isn’t for church, but for the world. Why the focus on church stuff? Because I don’t know where else a Christian could start from, to be honest. It’s not because Christians are somehow superior to their neighbors or wiser or more prone to natural virtues. But if you’re going to start a renewal of the world, I don’t know how you do it without turning to Jesus first.
That the Christian finds herself embedded within a dying world groaning for some sense of relief from the death of sameness, from the monotony of the doomscroll, from being alternately entertained to death and turning the pursuit of a just world into its own kind of game: what else could you ask for as far as opportunity to build this out? The structures of civil society (which perhaps we’ll talk about next week in celebration of the 4th of July) find themselves in their own kind of zombification, in need of exorcism before they can even be brought back from the dead. But one thing at a time.
This is not a foray into the woke/anti-woke stupidity that seems to be overtaking large swaths of what passes for Christian moral engagement. Talk about your zombie takeover of brains.
Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel, WJK Press, 1997 (1917), 178.
I draw this from Adam Phillips provocative book Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, in which he what seems to me to be close to an idolatry critique: the grass isn’t greener and even if it was, it’ll never live up to your dream of greenness.
The deep problem of all of the many conversations which want to identify Christian nationalism as the great threat to American life is that the polity which is envisioned for America by its detractors is frequently…also one inspired by Christian ideals and national in scope. No one would bat an eye at the claim that MLK, for example, articulated a vision for civil rights inspired by the Scriptures, and yet, it would feel out of joint to say that MLK was a Christian nationalist. Right?