Creative Speech or Coercive Act?

The way we pursue our convictions is just as essential as the convictions themselves

Peter Herrmann

It was probably 2018 or so when I first noticed the stream of tweets and posts, usually from a certain brand of progressive influencer, saying something to the effect of If this Sunday your pastor doesn’t explicitly mention _____ (fill in the blank with that week’s current political firestorm), you need to find another church. To be sure, we must grapple with where and when and how to speak a plain word — and it’s fair for those in our care to want to hear how the Scriptures bear witness to our real evils and turmoils. If all we ever offer are generic platitudes, we’ve surely lost the fire in the text. Worship and prayer provides no escape from the world’s pain, but rather thrusts us into the wounds, into the chaos. As we bend toward God, we also bend toward God’s world.

However, the broadsides irked me because pastoral work is intimate, relational, on the ground. When a pastor has given herself to a particular place and to loving a specific community of people — dealing with death and broken marriages and despair and terrors about the future and numerous complicated threads and a thousand conversations happening inside and outside worship (not everything worth saying should be said from the pulpit) — I will not presume to know better what good or unsettling word their people need in any given moment. So, challenge. Encourage. But have a bit of humility. Offer conviction with an open hand.

Apparently, lots of us are working from the same claustrophobic playbook. I’ve noticed certain layers of the rightward ecosphere trumpeting their own ham-fisted absolutisms. If your pastor doesn’t insist on ____ or if your pastor doesn’t demand adherence to_____… We’re not talking about credal fidelity here. The whole idea is ludicrous. No distant personality, no matter how boisterous or frothy or self-convinced, has the wisdom required for such contextual judgements. And purely on practical terms, if pastors said everything everyone else insisted we must say every Sunday, I doubt we’d ever get past the Call to Worship.

I mention all this here because the lambasting rhetoric really heats up in election seasons, and I suspect an even higher fever pitch over the coming weeks. In the war of persuasion, being certain God is on our side — and opposed to our enemy — represents the biggest weapon on the field. But for a Christian, the most troubling aspect of such a posture is how coercive it is, how fear-drenched. If the stories of creation and cross teach us anything, they for sure reveal how God is absolutely not coercive, not even for good, right, and necessary things. “Force is not an attribute of God,” says Ignatius of Antioch.

Here we arrive at one of the core truths thick in Earth and Altar, a truth Eugene handed me again and again over all the years of reading and conversation and pastoral friendship: the way we pursue or enact something is ever bit as crucial as the thing itself. The way we speak is as essential as the words we say. The way we pursue truth or justice is just as important as the truth or justice we presume to honor.

If we speak in a dehumanizing or violent way, our words (even if they are by the book correct) cease to be true. If we enact some measure of justice but we do so at the expense of love and dignity, then our justice is no longer just. If I locked my sons in their rooms all through their high school years “because I love them and want to protect them,” you’d know I’m a loon. I’d get locked up.

In our reading, Eugene puts it this way: “The means by which God’s rule is put into effect is word not muscle, decrees not armies, creative speech not coercive act.” Rather than coerce, God lays down God’s own life. God dies, descends into hell, rises as love’s strong warrior, woos us by wonder and goodness and holiness.

Any Christian vision failing that fundamental command to be for our neighbors (all of them, maybe especially those we disagree with the most) fails to be Christian. If our political vision hinges on a scorched earth toward the “other,” foments fear, and is concerned only about protecting a subset of our community rather than watching out for everyone — we have lost Jesus’ story, whatever righteous language we attach.

The good ends we hope for cannot be achieved by evil means. If we spread rumor and falsehood and gossip (enter: memes and much of social media)…if we demean and ridicule and spew contempt…if we fail to honor the belovedness of those we are arrayed against…then whatever we believe we’ve accomplished will be soot and ashes when the blazing wildfire passes.

We are desperate, as Eugene says, for creative speech, for generative words and courageous lives tenaciously committed to faith, hope, and love. We need at least a small cadre of everyday poets whistling in the dark, a gritty company persistently clinging to possibilities difficult to imagine right now, refusing the maelstrom that would dominate and consume us.

I’m not suggesting we abandon our convictions. God knows we need people with a backbone more than ever, people willing to live and speak the costly truth. We need more conviction, in fact. We need to become people so committed to our convictions we refuse to betray them by the means we employ in their service.

This is why we need prayer, Eugene insists. We must unshackle ourselves from the supposed almighty Powers (religious, political, cultural) so we can be remade by God’s story. We must deal with God, or we will be overrun by deceit and fear and violence. This new vision, this new humanity, gives us sturdy hope for our future, for our souls, for our country.

A third, and likely final, piece reflecting on Peterson’s Earth and Altar. Previous pieces were “Our Politics are Too Small” and “The Uprising”

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The Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination has begun a new podcast for pastors, and for everyone who needs a good word. Low in the Water is a short, 12ish minutes reflecting on an upcoming text from the lectionary, with original music and always a benediction. Click if you’d like to listen to this week’s episode (I’m on this week, and there’s 6 voices who rotate). You can subscribe wherever