A teachable moment
Daniel Pulliam, one of a team of bloggers at GetReligion, picks up a chunky quote of mine that I put in a comment to another post of theirs about the CPT in Iraq. As he excerpts it:
Christian Peacemaker Teams’ activities in Iraq are labeled absurd and foolish by many in the mainstream, but they draw from a long tradition (three to four centuries, anyway). And in other instances, for example in the movement to abolish slavery, such activities were often heaped with scorn (and sometimes violence) by other people calling themselves Christian.
You ask why coverage of this countercurrent is so weak. I think there’s a divide in the conception of what Christianity is about, the media tacitly recognize this and tend to avoid it because the secular outlook has no easy way to deal with such a deep conflict over issues. . . .
But elements to be considered include the Constantinian shift in the 4th century, the emergence of dissident sects during the Protestant reformation, the post-enlightment Church-State detente, and the industrial (and post-industrial) organization of warfare in the last century. [link]
Daniel chopped out my promise to cover some of these background elements here in the Street Corner Society blog, but I still have it in mind.
However, I feel pretty much out of my depth in terms of being able to lay all that out coherently. I’ll need some help here, in comments to posts, in suggestions for good sources of information, etc. The WordPress blogging software means we can promote individuals to front-page posting status, if anyone wants to try that. (I would say though, for the moment, that would be for posts within the ambit sketched out above.)
Whatever the outcome with the CPT members in Iraq, this may be a ‘teachable moment‘ and we ought to make the best of it. Use the “Contact us” page of this site for information on how to reach me directly.
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December 17th, 2005 at 2:06 am
BibleTexts.com is an excellent resource for information about what you call the “Constantinian shift;” the main feature of this site is its prodigious archive of Christian texts from before that shift. This article is a good place to start looking at “The beginning of Constantine’s cooption of Christianity: when Christian teachings and practices began to change drastically.”
Hope this helps.
Chuck and I are posting updates on this situation every day (and often several times per day). Tom Fox is a personal friend and mentor of mine, and Chuck has known him for over twenty years. Although we hope that this will all be over soon, we are bracing ourselves for the long term. Keep our efforts in your prayers.
FreeTheCaptivesNow.org
December 17th, 2005 at 6:03 am
Thanks John. I had discovered [BibleTexts.com](http://www.bibletexts.com/) earlier, and found it interesting enough to include it in the list of “Relevant Sites” on the main page. It doesn’t do a very good job for the reader who wants a general introduction to the concept.
Wikipedia has some good articles: one on the [Constantinian Shift](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinian_shift) and another about the [Apostasy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Apostasy) of the Roman Catholic Church itself.
I lumped Quakers and Anabaptists together in my off-the-cuff comment at the GetReligion blog, and one part of a general introduction would be to point out some of the differences. I *suppose* the early Friends picked the idea of apostasy up from the more general discourse, which had been going for awhile on the continent, and they appropriated it for their own critique of established churches in Britain — Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian — but that’s one of the areas where I’m relying on inference more than my own reading and research.
December 17th, 2005 at 6:35 pm
You might start here:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death– even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8)
(a little older than three to four centuries, anyway)