Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
James 4:7
As God's chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another. if anyone has a grievance against another. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive
Colossians 3:12-13
The world is in turmoil and the powers of hell are unleashing venom through the mouths of the very citizens who lobbied tirelessly for our votes with promises to serve the public good. The most democratic nation that goes after dictators in other lands is torturing and dehumanizing its citizens. We find ourselves scratching our heads when it doesn’t itch. Our minds can’t engage in any meaningful discussion because we are in the realm of nonsense. The Christian response is what scripture has always enjoined — resistance and its counterpart, submission. I invite us to take up this double-edged stance of resistance and submission as a pastoral theologian and spiritual care giver who knows the debilitating effect of staring at senseless evil because human bodies are not made to sustain themselves in probing the underbelly of evil without being drawn into its death-dealing ways.
First a word about resistance. Resistance is not a defensive weapon but an offensive weapon. It is not reactive and reacting to what the evil is performing but proactively demonstrating the good. Karl Barth invites us to consider this very point in the Lord’s Prayer as we intone “thy kingdom come”. To pray this is a call to arms in doing what makes the kingdom appear. It means that in this day the theological statement is to find what God is after moment by moment, indwell it in the company of the Holy Spirit and all people of good will, those willing good out of chaos amid the despair, and focus on birthing the new possibilities embedded in God's good future for all created reality.
Resistance also means that in this moment we are to avoid being drawn into the agenda of evil with its narcissistic perpetual attention seeking tentacles. We should endeavor to give it none of what it feeds on, none: no gawking at it in confusion and distress, no attempt to explain and account for it in our myriad tongues, because there are no words that can stand before it, except the Word that has dealt with it and will finish it off in due season.
The best way to deploy resistance as an offensive weapon is to submit to God who is life and love and submerge ourselves in trust and hope, refusing to be awed by nothing but love, which can be found in even the most innocuous places—the cooing of a child at its mother’s breast the smile of a toothless old woman remembering delight.
In this season hope is both our strategy and our attitude as we resist the call of evil and follow the voice of love in submission to God who calls us from the future. It is a hope that acts and leaves marks in the darkest places.
If we started with these two cardinal principles regarding evil, I wonder what our conversation, and in old English this is ones walk or way of life, look like? How might we then enter the space of learning and teaching in our theological institutions to prepare disciples for mission in the world? I believe than before, we need appropriate theological language to name this moment in order to frame responses that will last or at least for now, that will bring us back from the brink of self-destruction.
The invitation to resistance and submission as I have outlined, is even more urgent and needs to be attended to with humility and compassion and gentleness because we do this difficult work, this work of reflecting theologically around these issues that face us, in intuitions with lovely people who are not only unfazed but may even support the current situation and the moves that distress us.