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#1942 - Thursday, October 7, 2004 - Editor: Jerry
http://allafrica.com/stories/200410050516.html
Remove Christian Nation Nonsense
The Post (Lusaka)
EDITORIAL October 5, 2004 Posted to the web October 5, 2004
Lusaka
WHILE no one would oppose the protection of our people's right
to a religious faith or
belief, a right to profess a religion of their choice, we feel it
was madness to
legislate faith and religion into the Republican Constitution.
And apart from its potential for fundamentalism which could
one day be used against
Christians by a leadership of another religious persuasion which
the Catholic leadership
has aptly analysed, we feel it not even be justified biblically
or otherwise.
And we agree and support the position taken by the Catholic
Church in their submissions
to the Constitution Review Commission that the declaration of
Zambia as a Christian
nation in the preamble of the constitution should be omitted.
Yes, Christianity might be the religion of the majority
Zambians, but there are many
dedicated Zambians who profess other faiths, or don't profess any
faith at all, and that
the constitution belonged as fully to them as it does to those
that profess Christianity.
And truly "no loopholes should be left in the Republican
Constitution, which might, at
some further date, lead to non-Christian Zambians being regarded
as second-class citizens
or even excluded from public office".
And we share the Catholic leadership's position that the
Church and the state should
continue to remain separate.
We also agree with their view that the nation was not
Christian by declaration but rather
by deeds, "Zambia can be a Christian nation only if Zambian
Christians follow Jesus in a
life of love and respect for one another, a life of dedication,
honesty and hard work."
After all that has been said by our Catholic bishops on this
issue, we remain with only
one thing to say and we will say it at length.
In the Gospels, the totality of the human being is what brings
life to the spirit. Thus,
spirituality isn't the way you feel the presence of God. Nor is
it the way you believe.
Jesus said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,'
shall enter the kingdom of
heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in
heaven." Thus, spirituality is a
way of living life according to the spirit. They say "doing
is the best way of saying".
For Christians, living is the best way of believing. Faith
without deeds is worthless; as
James stated, "What does it profit, my brethren, if a man
says he has faith, but has not
works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad
and in lack of daily
food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and
filled,' without giving
them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So
faith, by itself, if it has
no works, is dead." (James 2:14-17). Our way of life is the
result of what we believe.
Our way of being the Church is a reflection of our concept of
God. In order to know a
Church, the best question to ask is "What do your faithful
think about God?" It is a
mistake to think that all believers believe in the same God. We
forget that in the Old
Testament the prophets were worried by idolatry, the gods created
in accord with human
interests. In the name of God, the colonialists colonized us.
In the name of God, multitudes of slaves were shipped from
Africa to work the land in the
Americas. Could it be that the name spoken by colonialists, slave
owners, and capitalist
oppressors is that of the God of the poor, of whom Jesus spoke?
We remember the tragedy
of Albert Schweitzer, who was a musician, doctor, and theologian.
Influenced by
Protestant research works on the authenticity of Jesus, he
concluded that the young man
from Nazareth hadn't expected to die so soon and that therefore
the conspiracy woven
around him had taken him by surprise. Now then, a god is never
wrong. If Jesus couldn't
anticipate the time of his death, it was because he wasn't God,
Schweitzer concluded.
A few years ago, an English minister by the name of Robinson
published a book that became
a best seller: Honest to God. The author states that we must be
honest with God and
confess that we do not know him. What we know are sketches, such
as the god invoked in
official documents, at critical moments in life, and in political
speeches.
How do you know a person: by what you think about him or by
what he reveals? If true
knowledge is derived from revelation, we can best know God in
Jesus Christ, his historic
presence. Even though medieval theology defines God as
omniscient, omnipresent,
omnipotent, etc., what we find when we open the Gospels is a
fragile being who lives
among the poor; cries over the death of a friend; feels hunger;
argues with the Apostles;
is enraged by the Pharisees; insults Herod; is aware of
temptation; and, when in agony,
goes through a crisis of faith when he feels abandoned by his
Father. P
erhaps Albert Schweitzer wouldn't have lost faith in the
divinity of Jesus if he had
recognized that divinity is not expressed by the fact that Jesus
had some kind of a
computer in his head enabling him to foresee everything.
According to the New Testament,
God's main attribute is love. In his first epistle, John the
Apostle is quite clear:
"Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and
he who loves is born of God,
and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is
loveî (1 John 4:7-8).
For the Greeks, who influenced the medieval definition of God,
love can never be an
attribute of a god; to the contrary, it is a lack, to the extent
to which it implies a
relation with the loved object. In this sense, Jesus is God
because he loved only as God
loves, and therefore He did not sin. He was a man centred not
upon himself but upon his
Father and the people.
This concept of a loving God led to the founding of a Church
based on fraternity, on a
community of interests, rather than authoritarianism. It is a
concept which enables
Christians to discover the presence of God in all those who,
though lacking faith, are
capable of attitudes of love. God is present even in those who
lack faith, and he has
identified historically with all those who most need our love:
the oppressed. "For I was
hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me
drink," Jesus said in Matthew
25. Love is necessarily a liberator.
Once you have clarified this question of a loving God, a God
calling for justice and
defending the rights of the poor, it is easier to speak of Jesus'
spirituality. If we
consider the Gospel accounts, we can clearly see that Jesus'
spirituality wasn't one of
withdrawal from the world, of moving away from everyday life in
order to better serve
God, of denying earthly realities. In John 17: I 5, Jesus asked
his Father to keep his
disciples from evil without taking them out of the world.
Jesus' entire existence was one of immersion in the
ideological conflict, in the arena
where different concepts and options for or against the oppressed
were discussed. Nor was
Jesus' spirituality that of moralism. That is the spirituality of
the Pharisees, who turn
their moral virtues into a sort of conquest of sanctity.
Many Christians have been trained along these lines and lose
strength in their faith
because they don 't manage to adjust to the pharisaical moralism
they seek. God seems to
live on the top of a mountain, and spirituality is taught as a
manual for mountain
climbing to be used by Christians interested in scaling its steep
slopes. Since we are of
a fragile nature, we begin our climb over and over again - it is
the constant repetition
of the Sisyphus legend, rolling the stone uphill.
Now then, one of the best examples of Jesus' nonmoralism is
the story of his encounter
with the Samaritan woman. From the point of view of the morals
prevailing in those times,
she was an outcast - for being a woman, a Samaritan, and a
concubine. It was to that
woman, however, that Jesus first revealed the messianic nature of
his mission.
An interesting dialogue took place between them: "The
woman said to him, 'Sir, give me
this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw. '
"Jesus said to her, 'Go, call
your husband, and come here. '
The woman answered him, 'I have no husband.' Jesus said to
her, 'You are right in saying,
"I have no husband"; for you have had five husbands,
and he whom you now have is not your
husband; this you said truly.' The woman said to him, 'Sir, I
perceive that you are a
prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that
in Jerusalem is the
place where men ought to worship.' Jesus said to her, 'Woman,
believe me, the hour is
coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you
worship the Father. But
the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will
worship the Father in
spirit and truth" (John 4: 15-23).
At no time did Jesus recriminate with her for having had six
men in her life. He was
interested in verifying that she was real. She didn't lie, didn't
take a pharisaical
position; therefore, she was able to adore "in spirit and
truth," in a subjective opening
to God and in an objective commitment to the truth.
Thus, Jesus showed that the Christian life wasn't a movement
of man toward God; before
that, there is God's love directed toward man. God loves us
irremediably. It only remains
for us to know if we are more or less open to that love, for
every love relationship
demands reciprocity and entails absolute freedom.
Christian morality, then, doesn't stem from our pharisaical
intention of being sinless;
it is a consequence of our love relationship with God, as love
imposes fidelity in a
couple.
The parable of the prodigal son is a good example of the
gratuitousness of the Father's
love. "But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw
him and had compassion, and ran
and embraced him and kissed him" (Luke 15:20).
The father's pardon and happiness is expressed over the mere
fact of the son's return
even before the latter explains the reason for his absence and
apologizes. So is God's
love for us. We see that Jesus' spirituality was life in the
spirit, within the
historical 'conflict, in a communion of love with the Father and
the people.
This spirituality was the result of his opening to the
Father's gift and of his
liberating commitment to the life aspirations of the oppressed.
For Jesus, the world
wasn't divided between the pure and the impure, as the Pharisees
wished; it was divided
between those who favoured life and those who supported death.
Everything that generates
more life - from a gesture of love to social revolution - is in
line with God's scheme of
things, in line with the construction of the kingdom, for life is
the greatest gift given
to us by God. Whoever is born is born in God to enter the sphere
of life.
At the same time Jesus' spirituality contradicted that of the
Pharisees, which consisted
of rites, duties, asceticism, and the observance of discipline.
Fidelity is the centre of
life for the Pharisees; the Father was the centre of life for
Jesus. The Pharisees
measured spirituality by the practice of cultural rules; Jesus
measured it by the filial
opening to God's love and compassion.
For the Pharisees sanctity is a human conquest; for Jesus it
was a gift of the Father for
those who opened up to his grace. Jesus' spiritual vigour stemmed
from his intimacy with
God, whom he familiarly called Abba - that is, Father (Mark
14:36). Like all those who
believe, Jesus had faith and he spent hours in prayer to nourish
it. Luke recorded those
hours in which Jesus allowed his spirit to be replenished by the
Father's Spirit: "But he
withdrew to the wilderness and prayed" (Luke 5: 16);
"In these days he went out to the
mountain to pray; and he continued all night in prayer to
God" (Luke 6: 12); and "Now it
happened that as he was praying alone" (Luke 9:18).
In that communion with the Father, he found strength for
struggling for the scheme of
life, challenging the forces of death, represented particularly
by the Pharisees, against
whom the Gospels present two violent manifestos (Matthew 23 and
Luke 11 :37-57).
And in this sense, all who struggle for life are included in
God's scheme, even if they
lack faith. "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when
did we see thee hungry and
feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see
thee a stranger and
welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And the King will answer
them, 'Truly, I say to
you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you
did it to me'" (Matt.
25:3740).
It is your fellow man, and especially the one who lacks life
and needs justice, in whom
God wishes to serve and love. They are the ones with whom Jesus
identified.
Therefore, there is no contradiction between the struggle for
justice and the fulfillment
of God's will. One demands the other.
All who work along that line of God's scheme for life are
considered Jesus' brothers and
sisters (Mark 3:31-35). This is the best way to follow Jesus,
especially in Zambia's
present situation.
We prefer to say that Jesus had a spirituality of the conflict
- that is, a vigour in his
commitment to the poor and to the Father who granted him immense
internal peace. That
faith gave Jesus the necessary will for carrying out the scheme
of life, even by
sacrificing his own life in confrontation with the forces of
death, such as oppression,
injustice, and religion made sclerotic by rules and rites.
Clearly, what really matters is not what one believes in but
how one uses his belief or
faith to constantly increase his respect for the people, to pay
systematic attention to
the social and human problems with which our people are faced, to
struggle to raise the
level of economic efficiency, to raise the quality of the
services and education, to
increase internationalist awareness and to do our specific jobs
the best we know how.
It is our collective duty to give millions of Zambians an
essential piece of dignity in
their lives - the dignity that comes from having a solid roof
over your head, running
water and other services in an established community.
Yes, we must nurture values. There's no alternative; authentic
values are those practiced
in the greatest freedom and not imposed by some ill-conceived
constitutional provisions.
Therefore, there's need to remove the Christian nation nonsense
from our Constitution.