Collapse or Eschaton?:

a Soteriology of Faith Against Law and Order

by: Brett Gershon and Isaac Zika

My heart is in anguish within me.
    the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and trembling come upon me,
    and horror overwhelms me.
And I say, “O that I had wings like a dove!
 I would fly away and be at rest;1

An End within an End…

Amidst a global pandemic that has dragged on for two years, we have heard it said that there will be no return to “normal.”  And still, as the virus has routed our population and wrought suffering on a global scale, we long for a return  to  normal. To pray for a return to normal during pandemic times is two prayers—as Mark Twain famously prophesied inside the prayers we utter are often unspoken prayers that are far more insidious.2 The state of being that we call “normal,” is both a “better” life for some as well as another contagion with its own implicit violence for others. “Normal” is forceful evictions of families from their homes; men, women, and children detained at borders; unarmed folks of color shot dead in the streets by so-called “protectors of peace.” In the present pandemic, we (who like the authors are white, male, and hold some degree of economic privilege) have tasted a measure of the normalized suffering in the world to which we are so often narcotized and numb. And so, we long for “normal” and languish in that longing. We long for our peace and to long for peace is good. However, what we call normal is not peace, but rather callous contentment that cannot hear the cries caused by our cruel, “normal” conditions. As the prophet Jeremiah wrote: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”3 

Indeed there is no peace, for the recent  acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse by a jury of his peers split the public in two. To some, it came as a shock that the U.S. judicial system would fail to convict the young man of such obvious crimes in his willful taking of life. To others, his acquittal was an event to be celebrated as the young man was lifted up as a hero whose bold actions were valorized and lauded. While it would appear that these positions are polar opposite, they have more in common than would first meet the eye. On the one hand, the incredulity that many of us assumed as the jury delivered its decision flows ultimately from some level of trust in the processes of judicial law to deliver justice. To look—mouth agape—at this particular trial as some kind of aberrant deviation from a fair and balanced system of governance is to ignore centuries of history  in which the law has proven time and again to serve not the interests of justice, but the interests of power. On the other hand, those who celebrate the young man—who carried his rifle across state lines to protect private property by any means necessary—also put their faith in law and order as the source from which good life flows. They see the law as having grown weak and needing to be shorn up and protected by the brave. And so is fulfilled “The LORD expected justice, but saw bloodshed, righteousness, but heard a cry!”4

Each of us are formed in this society abiding in the law and with the law abiding in us. We are all, at different times and in different ways, adherents of the twin idols of law and order. This is particularly true, however, for those of us socialized White. The complex associations between White identity, property ownership, and law are beyond the scope of this article, but inform our analysis in important ways. These associations are so thick that for many of us, when law and order begins to break down and fail, it can appear to us as if the whole world is in crisis and is indeed ending. This is true for those who carry arms into places of unrest to defend property (because the foundations of their world are under attack) as well as it is for those who are paralyzed by fear and trembling as the would be cops of alienated American life are unleashed to bring the law back into the land by the barrels of their guns, and those who pray for an end to civil-unrest with no intentions of personally addressing the conditions that have brought unrest. The world is, in fact, in the midst of crisis. It is both the crisis that is ongoing and ever present—the crisis of immense suffering at the hands of the powers of this world—and it is also the crisis of those very powers—which at the point of realizing their demise bring forth more violence in the service of their preservation.

In moments such as this, when we find that political and economic life becomes evermore deadly, where do we turn? In his book, Roland In Moonlight5, David Bentley Hart asks the question to his witty and wise dog Roland, “What is it . . . What is the proper response. . . . to moments of crisis like, you know, this one?” To which Roland replies with an exasperated sigh,

Why, to seek righteousness, of course. To love justice . . . and then to seek others of your kind to aid you in the great work of the tikkun olam, the world’s restoration . . . There is no other course. ​

This then becomes the invitation. To consider again that old question the psalmist phrased “Where does my help come from?” As the writers of Inhabit have beautifully articulated: there are two paths that diverge from the crisis6, the one girds up the existing world clinging to it even as it burns. The other proceeds from the ardent imaginations of the masses—not led by particular organizations, nor by uniform ideological formations, but acting nonetheless together as one—by participation in the destruction of the old forms of politics and everyday life so that the new can emerge. The crisis signals this divergence. Will we be able to say with the psalmist that our help comes not from the world as it exists, but “from the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth”? Will we be able to say that we put our trust not in the powers of this world, but in God who is making things anew? As the forces of repressive reaction gather around us, how might we see through these bleak eyes and begin to participate in weaving the new world? How do we seek righteousness amidst moments where the world flexes its reign of death? We might here notice that while the world appears apocalyptically at its end, that our end as fellow creatures with all of creation might just be more clearly revealed—to rejoice in the Love that sustains our very beings and calls us into common union with all of creation and the One who is Love. What we perceive as collapse could be more properly understood as “eschaton...the end of the world coinciding with the beginning of the world as the Kingdom of God...eschaton means hope”7. And so, let us recognize this moment for the moment that it is: kairos! Let us have eyes to “See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!”.8

Bastardized Ends

In order to discern our common end, or telos, whilst the world ends, let us first consider those forces that divert us from our goal of righteous living. The late Baptist preacher, civil rights activist, and anti-racist missionary to the Ku Klux Klan, Will Campbell often said “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway” (Campbell, 220).9 We want to invite our readers who identify as White to hear in Campbell’s words a name for our collective condition. We intend the word bastard to mean that White people are the product of an entire legal, economic, and social system that claims to lend legitimacy but that is in itself entirely illegitimate. We extend this meaning to counter and undo the archaic meaning of the word: a child born from a non-normative pairing of people. We further contend that such an archaic meaning gives further support for our weaponized use of the word. Because the puritanical police powers that named people illegitimate are themselves illegitimate due to their rootage in the idolatry of private property and profit that sacrifices human life. (And so we both name all police as bastard because they are rooted in the illegitimate legitimacy of White supremacy) By naming White supremacy as a bastard gospel, and all those of us who are White as its bastard offspring, we reclaim this word as a means of grace and wrench it away from all lawless lawgivers and enforcers who would shame and chain people for loving each other and bearing new lives in that love.10   

By naming Whiteness as “bastard” in nature, we are practicing the prophetic mode of speech that Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann names as “radical criticism and radical delegitimizing” with regard to the entire project of White supremacist law and order.11 By naming this legal tradition—which projects itself as the premier legal tradition and great font and guardian of liberty and life—as illegitimate, we hope to call all of its fraudulent fruit into question and foment its failure and fall. Finally, it is towards the end of remembering ourselves as human beings born of God’s love that we White people name ourselves bastards. Because this allows us to truthfully name illegitimate powers that have claimed sovereignty over our lives and led us to falsely believe that we too are sovereign over non-white others. By naming these powers as illegitimate we can come to see the ways that we have been illegitimately formed in ways antithetical to love. We can then see clearly and find ourselves embraced in the Love that graciously creates and sustains all beings—thus exposing all death dealing powers as fraudulent and illegitimate.12 With Noel Ignatiev, of blessed memory, we hope and work for the day “...when there comes into being a critical mass of people who look white but do not act white—people who might be called “reverse oreos”—the white race will undergo fission, and former whites, born again, will be able to take part, together with others, in building a new human community”.13

Let us consider now, that if our collective calling is the righteous living that seeks the restoration of the world, then any message of salvation that diverts us from this calling is a bastard gospel that forms us into bastardized human beings who live according to an unrighteous-righteousness and a lawless-lawfulness.  Any adherence to lived political logics which legitimize harm, suffering, and death to maintain the purity of that which “saves” us is rooted in an illegitimate understanding of who we are. The gospels according to cisheteropatrirachal White supremacist capitalism are thus bastard gospels. As bell hooks of blessed memory elucidates how these bastard gospels form White men:

White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression.14

When we speak of “Whiteness” it is thus an ideological formation that we are naming. While skin color signals a dominant position within this socialization, we are not speaking of a problem of mere skin, but as James Perkinson notes in White Theology,

a problem of the body, of its place of dwelling, of its source of nurture, of its social scripting, its educational training, its resources of protection, its erotics of desire, its politics of control, its ecology of energy. It is a political problem with a psychological source . . . or perhaps the other way around.15

Understanding oneself primarily as “White” is to align oneself with so-called “law and order” and with the economic behemoth that kills and devours without end. It is to find one's source of salvation at the nexus of private property, individual merit, and the pantheon of legal entities that preside over our nation. It is to uphold the overarching system that produces people like Kyle Rittenhouse and the people whom Kyle was striving to be like and who encouraged him on his path: cops. Kyle and the cops exemplify the role of White people in the upkeep of American style capitalism as it develops alongside and intertwined with White supremacy. They are bastardized shepherds created and sustained by—in order to re-create and sustain—our White way of life. They are the very antithesis of the Good Shepherd. They carry the power of death in order to defend death’s domain. Perhaps most tragically, they (police officers and Kyle) themselves (and we who are White) are consumed by the very death that they (and all of us who are White) worship and serve. So it goes with all who live by the sword and lord it over others as would be rulers in the Kingdom of cisheteropatatriarchal White supremacist capitalism. We (White people and our bastardized shepherds) each lose our very souls through our allegiance to the world made in the White image.

As Mariame Kaba’s advocacy has illuminated, our system of law has routinely incarcerated young black women—we call to mind Chrystul Kiser and Bresha Meadows—who have killed their abusers in self-defense and those trafficking them in the sex trade,16 and yet sets a Rittenhouse (armed protector of property) free on the grounds of self-defense. This  is a system in which justification flows not from righteousness, but from proximity to and identification with the values of Whiteness. The law reveals itself in these moments of crisis not to be interested in the safety, well-being, and rescue of the people who dwell under it, but only in the preservation of foundational social relations. This law is lawless in that it institutionalizes the hatred and murder of our siblings.17 It bastardizes us from our call to “love one another” and thus to “remember the poor”18 It humiliates and sacrifices poor and oppressed people to satisfy its idols of pure private property. This law is an illegitimate, bastard law.

Dry Eyes and Callous Hearts

The veteran Civil Rights activist and public theologian Ruby Sales asks “Where does it hurt?” and “What do you say to someone who has been told that their whole essence is Whiteness and power and combination, and when that no longer exists, then they feel as if they are dying?”.19 It is this feeling of death that we believe is central to Whiteness and its gospel. Fearing this deathly feeling, we practice hardening our hearts in order to avoid feeling the pain that Whiteness causes us to participate in. The gospel of White supremacy thrives among such hardened and hardening, numbed and numbing White hearts. We call this “objectivity” and it runs deep through dominant journalistic media, courts of law,  public policy, and around our dinner tables as we discuss today’s tragic events, but fail to be moved by them. We call it objectivity, but it is better understood as a calloused heart. As Martín Prechtel beautifully puts it, Grief and Praise are of the same soil. If we can’t weep then neither can we love.20 Speaking of  Jesus weeping in compassion for others, Walter Brueggemann notes that “[Jesus’] weeping permits the kingdom to come. Such weeping is a radical criticism, a fearful dismantling because it means the end of all machismo; weeping is something kings rarely do without losing their thrones”21. In this way, “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” becomes no longer an esoteric saying but an imminently practical invitation for numb White people—trained as we are to imagine ourselves as royalty who rule over nonwhite others. For it is our numbness that permits us to rule over others while ignoring their anguished cries for breath. Through the gift of tears, our eyes might be opened by the Great Physician to see that in this time of crisis when it appears that the world (read, the White world) is ending, creation’s end is indeed revealed. Our creaturely telos, is to become united in love with the God who is love. In this love we can enter into the depths of crisis, because that is where Jesus dwells. 

 We have been promised care at the hands of the law, but care is born of love and the law cannot weep. We must unlearn the objectivity of this world’s gospel and feel our way back to a way of care and love that exists outside of the law. When the streets become filled with the cries of those abandoned by the law and when the collective grief of this world is expressed as outrage, can we  also weep? Can we begin to see that in every uprising there is  a rejection of a false gospel?

Obedience of Uprising

Uprising occurs when the normalized suffering of the masses becomes suddenly amplified. Crisis clarifies, in a way, the economic and political conditions under which we live—when we are no longer able to see ourselves  as existing under the protections of the law. On the other hand, crisis provokes reaction—to seek a return to the normalized conditions of suffering. To rise-up or to react? Despite what many would like to believe, there is no middle road. For those of us socialized White and as adherents of the law,  there is no substantial difference between the cops and Kyle Rittenhouse who serve the temple of property through force,  those who prefer to numb out and ignore the news of the  muder of BIPOC people who run afoul the god of mammon, and those blissful shallow souls who find their glee in the market’s latest apogee.  These are all under the soteriological domain of death which answers the question, “what will save my life?” with the hollow promise that another’s suffering will raise us up, rather than the rising of our risen Lord. 

For those to whom the gospel of the law has never been offered, there is a readiness for revolt against its logics and its institutions. However, for those of us more proximate (by wealth, social standing, education, and skin) to its criterion for entry into the law’s kingdom, we live constantly under the thrall of its promises. 

Having seen with our own eyes George Floyd and countless other unarmed and peaceful men and women killed at the hands of the law, it would indeed appear that we have been spellbound that we would continue to understand the law as integral to our deliverance.22  Has God set us free or do we continue to find our salvation in the materialistic deceptions of the laws of this land? It is only by deception that we cannot see what has been made evident—that law and order deliver death23, but our faith in one who is Love is where life is found in abundance.  It is in this understanding of our captivity to the law that we seek a repentant turning away—a refusal of the empty promises of law and order—toward the great work of renewal of which God has called us into participation.

We have had the bastard gospel’s promises for safety and security dangled before us as dogs on a track. We have taken the bait and we have run circles as people abiding in the law all our lives. Can we now begin to see in whom we truly abide? 

We have worshiped in churches with million dollar endowments and with congregations who can better imagine a world in which we are not Christian than one in which we are not white. We have given praise for blessings that flow from wealth and bowed before altars adorned with flags. May we place our identities back in the hands of God who is saving us and making the world anew.   

We have learned beneath pulpits bereft of tears while unarmed Black siblings are shot dead in our streets. We have watched and shared videos of men and women crying out for their mothers in their last moments of life with only a modicum of horror and we have slept while suffering siblings have raged for a world free from the bondage of heinous death. May we learn to weep and to rage.

We have sat in company echoing calloused commentary of bastard pundit preachers valorizing killers and casting aspersions on the dead. We have sat entranced by the glow of televisions selling us handfuls of everything we don’t need while portraying uprisings and revolts as the acts of selfish “thugs” attempting to seize a particular political moment for their own selfish gain. May we resolve not to give ourselves over to this nihilism, but to act in hope and rage against every false gospel which we have ever put our faith in. Let us then seek instead together the great work of the world’s restoration creatively manifest in God’s tearing down of every wicked thing.

In this time of crisis, it is revealed to those who have eyes to see that a world is indeed ending (powers of death are clamping down as they themselves sense their imminent demise) and that humanity’s collective end is revealed as those who are born of the very Shepherd of Love who creates and sustains all that exists.  As John Holloway reminds us, when we think hope, we think crisis.24The crisis of our times is a weakness of law, but that crisis is our very strength (which is God’s strength) and we bear witness to that strength as we weave the world to come.

See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!25

Notes:

1. ​Psalm 55:4-6.  This and all scriptural quotations in this essay are from the NRSV
2. Twain, Mark, and John Groth. The War Prayer. New York: Published in association with Harper & Row, 
   1968. Print.
3. Jeremiah 8:11
4. Isaiah 5:7b
5. ​Bentley Hart, David. Roland in Moonlight.  Angelico Press (February 21, 2021
6. ​Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy. https://inhabit.global
7. Stringfellow, William. A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning. Nashville, TN: 
   Abingdon, 1982. Pg. 141
8. ​2 Corinthians 6:2
9. ​Campbell, William D. Brother to a Dragonfly. NewYork: The Continuum Publishing 
   Corporation, 1998. Pg. 220
10. Zika, Isaac. “On White Bastards” Brethren Life & Thought Blog. December 16, 2021. https://www.brethrenlifeandthought.org/2021/12/16/on-white-bastards-an-essay-in-two-parts-by-isaac-zika/
11. Brueggeman, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. Pg. 9
12. Zika, Isaac. - - - 
13. Ignatiev, Noel. “The Point Is Not to Interpret Whiteness but to Abolish It.” Talk given at the 
    Conference “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness” University of California, Berkeley, April 11-13, 1997. https://blog.pmpress.org/2019/09/16/the-point-is-not-to-interpret-whiteness-but-to-abolish-it/
14. hooks,  bell. All About Love: New Visions. Perennial in New York, 2001. Pg. 194
15. Perkinson, James. White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan; 1st edition 
    (December 3, 2004). Pg. 154.
16. ​​Kaba, Mariame. Survived and Punished: Survivor Defense as Abolitionist Praxis. 
    https://survivedandpunished.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/survived-and-punished-toolkit.pdf
17. 1 John 3
18. ​1 John 3 & Galatians 2:10
19. ​Ruby Sales interviewed by Krista Tippet, “Where does it hurt?” On Being. September 15, 2016. 
    https://onbeing.org/programs/ruby-sales-where-does-it-hurt/.
20. ​Prechtel, Martín. The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise. North Atlantic Books; Illustrated edition 
    (April 14, 2015).
21. Brueggeman, Walter. - - - Pg. 57.
22. ​From Galatians 3.
23. Mariame Kaba terms the carceral legal system a collection of “death making institutions.”--“What does accountability look like without Punishment?” Nation of Change, May 31, 2021. https://www.nationofchange.org/2021/05/31/what-does-accountability-look-like-without-punishment/
24. Holloway, John. “Think Hope, Think Crisis.” Printed version of a popular lecture given around the world.
25. ​2 Corinthians 6:2

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Drawn by Bryn Harding. Instagram @bryn.harding

Isaac Zika and Brett Gershon

Friends for over a decade, Isaac and Brett met as communitarians at the Mennonite Worker (Missio-Dei) community in Minneapolis, MN where they wrestled together with questions of what genuine evangelism might look like in our context where Christianity is buried under so many bastard gospels.