A New View of the Beatitudes

The most basic teachings of Jesus Christ are found in what is known as the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in chapters five through seven of the Gospel according to Matthew. What is generally called the Beatitudes are found in that fifth chapter, and I invite you to consider, newly, those verses. 

Following the Call: A Good Old View

On Jan. 2, the first Sunday of this new year, I started reading the book Following the Call (2021), edited by Charles E. Moore and issued by Plough Publishing House.**

There are 52 chapters in Moore’s new book (and I plan to read a chapter every Sunday morning this year). On the page before the first chapter, the “overview” begins with these words:

The beatitudes are a summary of the entire Sermon [on the Mount], shorthand for what is to come. They describe Jesus himself . . . . And they depict the character of those who strive to follow Jesus.

Each chapter of Moore’s book has one to four brief excerpts from the writings of a wide variety of notable Christians. Chapter 1 begins with words by E. Stanley Jones (1884~1973), the venerable Methodist missionary to India. Jones wrote:

Here is the key to the Sermon on the Mount. We mistake it entirely if we look on it as the chart of the Christian’s duty; rather, it is the charter of the Christian’s liberty—his [or her] liberty to go beyond, to do the thing that love impels and not merely the thing that duty compels.

American Saint: A Good New View

One of the intriguing novels I read last year was American Saint (2019) by Sean Gandert, about whom I was unable to learn much, even from his website.

The “saint” in Gandert’s book is Gabriel Romero, who was “raised in a poor neighborhood in Albuquerque by his mother and curandera [= medicine woman] grandmother” and who “grows up fervently religious, privately conflicted, and consumed by what he’s certain is the true will of God.”

Toward the climax of the novel, Gabriel preaches at the Sunday morning Mass in the unconventional (Catholic) church he started. In his sermon he paraphrases the Beatitudes, not as describing Jesus himself but rather suggesting what “love impels” (Jones). Here is what he says:

So who now, I ask, are those who Christ supports? Who are the meek, the hungry, the poor? Who are the pure in heart and the ones who mourn? I tell you they are the same now as they were two thousand years ago, and that God has not lost sight of them, no matter how much the rest of us have. God tells us this: blessed are the immigrants, for they shall find comfort in the land of God. 

Blessed are the homeless, for they shall find shelter. 

Blessed are the addicts, for they shall find relief. 

Blessed are those who suffer from racist oppression, for they shall find justice. 

Blessed are those who find themselves with child and choose not to carry to term, for they shall find compassion. 

Blessed are those whose lands have been stolen and colonized, for they shall own their own destinies. 

Blessed are the prisoners and the unjustly convicted, for they will find freedom. 

And blessed are those shunned because of their gender or sexuality, for they shall find love” (pp. 288-9).

Can We Agree with Gabriel?

As you might guess, some who heard Gabriel’s new view of the Beatitudes were offended and criticized his ideas as outlandish. In reflecting on that development, Anna, who was one of Gabriel’s most faithful supporters, declared,

You get a lot of hate for spreading a message of love. You get a lot of hate for acting out the words of Christ, who wasn’t particularly popular in His day either (p. 306).

So, what about it? Can we agree with Gabriel, or do we want to be judgmental of those who are hurting the most? Can we recognize and affirm God’s amazing grace?

_____

** (Moore, b. 1956, is a long-time Bruderhof member and currently is a member of the Durham House, a Bruderhof community in North Carolina. I first learned of him when I read Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Søren Kierkegaard, 1999, which he edited and which I highly recommend.)

Affirming the Social Gospel: In Appreciation of Walter Rauschenbusch

He was born 160 years ago on October 4, 1861, the first year of the Civil War, and died in 1918, a few months before the end of World War I, but Walter Rauschenbusch hated militarism and other societal problems that cause human suffering and the degradation of human life.

Acknowledgment of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel

In all three of my “theological” books, I wrote about Rauschenbusch. In Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007, 2020) I wrote that the Social Gospel was “the third factor [after Darwinism and biblical criticism] which helped instigate the fundamentalist movement.”

And I explained, “The most significant leader of the Social Gospel was the prominent Baptist historian Walter Rauschenbusch” (p. 30).

In The Limits of Liberalism (2010, 2020), one sub-section is “The Liberalism of Rauschenbusch” (pp. 31~35), and later I wrote that for many “the main religious appeal of liberalism is found in its ethical stance, which has often been shaped by the emphasis of Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel” (p. 109).

Then in #5 of Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2018), I wrote about Rauschenbusch’s “strong emphasis on the idea that the kingdom of God is both here now and also coming in the future” (p. 36).

In his book Christianizing the Social Order (1912), Rauschenbusch used the phrase “the kingdom is always but coming,” and that became the title of the superb 2004 biography of Rauschenbusch by Christopher H. Evans.

Formation of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel

Walter Rauschenbusch was the son of German parents who had immigrated to New York. After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary, from 1886 to 1897 he served as the pastor of the Second German Baptist Church, located in the slum section of New York City known as Hell’s Kitchen.

That was at the apex of the Gilded Age when there was great and growing inequality between the upper and lower classes. For example, at the time when so many lived in crowded, vermin-infested tenements in Hell’s Kitchen, rich industrialists lived in luxury on 5^th Avenue and Madison Avenue.

John D. Rockefeller’s NYC home was less than a mile from Second German Baptist Church, and J.P. Morgan as well as William K. Vanderbilt and his flamboyant wife Alva lived only 1.2 miles from Rauschenbusch’s church. Here is a picture of the Vanderbilt mansion, completed in 1882. 

Rauschenbusch said that he went to his new pastorate “to save souls in the ordinarily accepted religious sense.” But in the area where his church was located, unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, disease, and crime were rampant.

He came to understand that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount spoke more about how to live in the present rather than how to prepare for life after death. Further, he came to realize that Jesus’ key teaching about the Kingdom of God was also for the here and now, not just about the “sweet by and by.”

Affirmation of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel

Even though I have remained critical of some aspects of Rauschenbusch’s “liberal” theology, such as his being overly optimistic about the possibility of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth by human effort, through the years I have increasingly come to affirm his basic theological ideas.

Here are some of the most important emphases in Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel.

    * Jesus’ core teachings are found in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5~7) and in his parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46).

    * The basis of Jesus’ teachings was his understanding of the Kingdom of God, which Rauschenbusch rightly understood as “always but coming.”

    * In addition to the reality and seriousness of “personal” sins, the pervasiveness and destructiveness of social sin and sinful social structures must be recognized and adamantly opposed.

The crux of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel is still sorely needed now as it was in the 1890s and in 1917 when he published his last book, A Theology for the Social Gospel.

Can we and will we affirm, accept, and implement that Gospel? It is truly good news for the multitude of people who are suffering deprivation, discrimination, and destructive social structures right now.

In Memory of Leo Tolstoy

It was 110 years ago today that Count Lev Nikolayevich (Leo) Tolstoy, the famous Russian writer, died at the age of 82, a month younger than I am now—and except for the mustache, my covid-19 pandemic beard now looks much like his as seen in the following picture taken near the end of his life. 

Remembering Tolstoy as a Novelist

Leo Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828, about 200 kilometers south of Moscow. The third son of a landowning aristocrat, he inherited an estate consisting of a huge manor house and property with nearly 500 serfs.

After spending his young manhood in profligacy, in 1851 he joined the Russian army. He was an artillery officer during the Crimean War and was a part of the forces the British light brigade charged against, as described in my Oct. 20 post.

Reacting negatively toward that war, Tolstoy left the army and after traveling around Europe for a while, he began founding schools for peasant children in Russia. During the 1850s, even while still a soldier, he began to write novellas.

In the next decade, then, Tolstoy became a full-fledged novelist. War and Peace, his first, and very long and complicated, major novel, was published in 1869. It was followed by another lengthy novel, Anna Karenina, published in 1878.

Tolstoy wrote many novellas and literary works of many kinds, but his only other major novel was Resurrection, which was not published until 1899. Yes, with just three major works, and the third not widely read, Tolstoy is still recognized as one of the best novelists the world has ever seen.

Remembering Tolstoy as a Christian

Although baptized and brought up in the Russian Orthodox Church, Tolstoy wrote that by the age of 18 he had “lost all belief in what I had been taught.” Those are words from Confession (1882), the book he wrote in his early 50s about becoming a follower of Jesus Christ.

So, for the last 30 years of his life, Tolstoy lived and wrote as a Christian believer—but not as a member of the Orthodox Church, which, in fact, excommunicated him in 1901.

Tolstoy’s writings during those years were largely of a man who sought to follow the teachings of Jesus, especially as found in the Sermon on the Mount.

Selections of Tolstoy’s Christian writings are published in a 325-page book under the title The Gospel in Tolstoy (2015), and I much enjoyed reading that book this fall.

“My Way to Faith,” the fourth chapter, is an excerpt from Confession in which Tolstoy wrote, “As long as I know God, I live.” Also, “To know God and to live come to one and the same thing. God is life.”

Chapter 20 is “What Is the Meaning of Life?” from one of Tolstoy’s most theological writings, The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894).

Remembering Tolstoy as a Teacher 

Although Tolstoy was never a teacher in a formal sense, through his writings some of the world’s best-known people, and a multitude of unknown people, have learned important lessons from him.

Tolstoy became an important teacher for Mahatma Gandhi, for Martin Luther King Jr., and for Dorothy Day. And although certainly not widely known, he was also a teacher for Nishida Tenko-san, the subject of my 2/24/13 blog post, and I encourage you to (re)read that post.

Actually, Tolstoy has had much influence in Japan and is still seen as a trustworthy teacher there. In 2018 a Japanese woman published an article titled “What Today’s Youth Can Learn From the Great Russian Writer Leo Tolstoy.” She mentions Nishida (1872~1968) in her thoughtful article.

So, even though he died 110 years ago, Tolstoy is still remembered and honored as a brilliant writer—and as one who by his life and writings taught what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

In Fond Memory of Tenko-san

Not many Americans know about him, but Nishida Tenko was an outstanding man who deserves to be known and appreciated more widely. He died 45 years ago this week (on 2/29/68) at the age of 96. Even though I never had the privilege of meeting him personally, I have very fond memories of the days I spent at Itto-en, the Christian/Zen commune he started on the eastern edge of Kyoto City, Japan.

As a young man (in 1904) Tenko-san had a deep religious experience, partly from reading Leo Tolstoy’s “Confession” (sometimes published under the title My Religion). Through Tolstoy, he was greatly influenced by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Partially because of that influence, later in the year of his “conversion” Tenko-san started Itto-en (“Garden of One Light”), which was finally able to acquire its first building in 1913.

Perhaps Tenko-san lived by the literal teachings of the Sermon on the Mount more than anyone after Francis of Assisi in the 13^th century. And for more than a century now, the community life and activities of Itto-en have demonstrated a fascinating blend of Jesus’ teachings and Zen Buddhist spirituality.

The best source for learning about Tenko-san and Itto-en in English is the book A New Road to Ancient Truth, first published in 1969. Mostly a collection of sayings by Tenko-san, the book’s entire “Author's Foreword” are words expressing one of his most profound insights: “In having nothing lies inexhaustible wealth.”

(There is also a website with information about Itto-en at this link.)

In the 1970s, just a few years after Tenko-san’s passing, I traveled to Itto-en with a few of my students for a four-day training session. It was a very memorable experience, one that I still treasure. There were lectures explaining Tenko-san’s teachings, and then we participants engaged in some of the same activities that those who lived at Itto-en did regularly.

Cleaning toilets (bathrooms) has been considered (especially in the past) a very disagreeable activity in Japan. As a means of fostering a spirit of humble service, Itto-en members (and participants in training sessions there) have systematically gone throughout the Kyoto area, knocking on doors and asking for the “privilege” of entering their houses in order to clean their toilets. That was, truly, an interesting experience. (Imagine the surprise of a Kyoto housewife opening her door to find a foreigner with a reddish beard, me, offering to clean her toilet!)

The next day we were taken to a nearby area where, with absolutely no money, we were told to offer our time in service, helping other people. If we were offered something to eat or drink, we could accept it. But we were not supposed to beg. I was fortunate to find a woman working in her rather large vegetable garden. She allowed me to use her hoe while she rested and gave me instructions on what to do. Then she graciously offered to fix me lunch, which I was more than happy to accept. (As we were eating her delicious meal, she told how her husband’s family had lived on this same property for more than 400 years!)

Trusting in God to provide for one’s needs, living in community and helping one another, and humbly serving others with a heart of compassion: these are principles that Tenko-san learned from the Sermon on the Mount and put into practice at Itto-en. Even though he died 45 years ago, Itto-en remains and still seeks to practice those principles. And there are people who still learn from, and many like me who fondly remember, the teachings and example of Tenko-san.