Abstract
In long-overdue protests for racial justice as well as in seemingly endless campaign rhetoric about all that is wrong with society and government we hear plenty about what is wrong with society and the larger world. We hear denunciations of unjust social systems that perpetuate centuries of inequity. We hear—usually wrongly—that immigrants are a threat. We hear, too, about government bloat, the obscene polarization of wealth, and about human responsibility for environmental degradation and climate change. It seems that everyone today is playing defense in that they are trying to stop something from happening.
While teaching in my educational psychology course this past fall semester about the dynamics of change for individuals and groups, the plenary conversation moved from the psychological realm into the social and, ultimately, the theological. To provide a way to think productively about change, I explained Vygotsky's notion of the “Zone of Proximal Development”. In Vygotsky's view, learners can attain new insight if the new knowledge builds from their existing frames of reference and does not demand that they stretch beyond their capacity to be stretched at any one juncture.
In that same discussion, I introduced Ron Heifetz's insight that real and substantive change almost always involves a grief process. For this reason, substantive systematic and personal changes are rarely solely matters of reason. According to Heifetz, resistance to change always involves a reluctance to grieve something in the past that provided meaning, value, and purpose. Effective leadership for meaningful change in a system, therefore, requires a combination of articulating the new vision and helping people to work through the processes of grief for the old thing that they there are in the process of giving up. Without attending sufficiently to the grief processes involved, real change will likely be thwarted.
With the combination of Vygotsky's “Zone of Proximal Development” and Heiftetz's affirmation that real change involves managing grief, the class and I talked about what it would take for Americans, particularly White Americans, to change the social order in the direction of a more racially egalitarian and inclusive pattern of social life. To demand that people instantly become something well beyond what and where they are now will likely only lead to backlash and defensive disengagement. Yet, to do nothing and to be silent will simply allow the unjust structures to perpetuate and even to grow. Thinkers like Vygotsky and Heifetz can surely be helpful for developing a constructive way forward today. But are denunciations and demands for change tempered by gradualism and management of grief processes sufficient to get society and its members to a better place?
In the midst of the discussion in my class about the dynamics of change, it occurred to me that making real and substantive alterations to the social order would be facilitated greatly by having a compelling positive vision of a more desirable future toward which we should move. Such a vision would increase the likelihood of letting go of old ways and of promoting a willingness to be open toward something new. That discussion brought into focus for me what I think to be sorely lacking in contemporary discourses: a positive vision that would be compelling enough to make people from all races, classes, genders, and sexual orientations want to work together toward its realization. Where might such a constructive vision be found?
I want to suggest that we might find such a compelling vision in an unlikely place: the book of Revelation. I have often kept my distance from a book that gives rise perpetually to crazy schemes by religious fanatics about the end of the world. Only under the influence of Palestinian Christians have I come to see Revelation as something more than a breeding ground for nutty religious extremism. Through their contextual readings of Revelation, I have come to see that the book can provide profound hope in the midst of a terrible and seemingly hopeless situation. Digging deeper into the background of the book, I have come to see that it contains visions that are at once profoundly subversive of the existing unjust social order and astonishingly hopeful for a way to live together in and because of differences. In particular, I have come to appreciate the glimpse of a subversively doxological future found in Revelation 7:9–10: After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
Upon further reflection, I find that the socio-spiritual vision offered by the book of Revelation has its roots in the mystery of baptism. In his letter to the Christian community in Galatia, Paul the Apostle described the meaning of baptism in terms of a fundamental refiguration of the status of race, class, and gender: … for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:26–28)
Paul's subsequent epistolary confrontation with the Christian community in Corinth concerning their unjust meal practices has its foundations in the radical theology of baptism articulated in Galatians 3. Paul took the Corinthian congregation to task for their replication of the unjust socio-economic class stratifications that were characteristic of social life outside the church inside the church fellowship. Paul's prophetic eucharistic theology builds upon and extends his radically countercultural theology of baptism. Ultimately, the hopeful vision grounded in Paul's understanding of the power of baptism that runs through his prophetic confrontation about Corinthian eucharistic practice reaches its (theo-)logical conclusion in Revelation 7.
Perhaps we should see the current struggles in church, academy, and society over matters of inclusion, equality, and appreciation of differences as “birth pangs” of the new future that God is bringing to birth for the human family. If so, all of us live in a time of tension between current disordered realities and the future realization of God's multicultural vision. In this tensive and, therefore, necessarily agonizing time, we can allow ourselves neither to think that we will, by our own efforts, bring about the realization of the vision we find in Revelation 7 nor that we can and should do nothing since everything depends upon God's action. Instead of the distortions of activism and passivism, we should embrace a visionary engagement that denounces injustices and idolatries because it is based on an announcement of a vision of unity in diversity as found in Galatians 3 and Revelation 7. To be sure, this is a distinctly Christian vision that does not directly address religious pluralism. At the very least, though, it is a place from which Christian thinking about a positive vision could begin. Much work would have to be done in order to forge a working balance between Christian particularity and openness to individuals and communities from other religions or from no religion whatsoever. Despite these limitations, I think that in Galatians 3 and Revelation 7, we in the Christian community can find something constructive to bring to the table of public discourse today.
Do we have a sense of where we ought to go in the future? What would a positive vision of a more desirable future entail? When I have posed such questions to friends, students, and colleagues, there is often a pause for reflection and then some reference is made to Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I have a Dream” speech or to his description of the “Beloved Community.” I follow up by asking whether we should simply reassert MLK's vision, revise it, or replace it with something better. Most of the time, I get the response that we should reassert his vision with a few changes. Fuller work on that requires more reflection on another day. For this moment, I think we can learn at least from MLK that confronting injustices and idols in society has to be funded by a positive vision that offers a way to move forward to a better place together. Stated another way, we can learn from MLK that often the best defense is a visionary offense.