Religion, tribal identity and grace
Stephen Curkpatrick

There is a propensity for humans to define themselves and their responsibilities by differences. This occurs socially, conventionally, legally and religiously with varying intensity.

In the quest to secure a place under the sun, human experience and identity is couched incessantly in contrary or binary oppositions—oppositions that define and therefore exclude, which is evident in social, political and religious forums.

Binary thinking—two definitive positions cast in opposition—is most dangerous when God is identified with one position relating to gender, social status, ethnicity or culture. However a religious tribe identifies itself, binary thinking is a source of exclusivity, defining insiders and outsiders, articulating rewards for insiders and refining various forms of tacit and explicit deprivation or punishment for those who would blur or breach conventional boundaries.

When God is employed to sanction binary exclusions, God is also the source of endorsing deprivations of human dignity. This can lead to a spiral of violence—verbal, physical, social and spiritual. This occurs in religion without fail.

Tribal determination of what it is to be human, how reality is perceived and the specificity of its imperatives, permeate religious traditions. Religion inevitably concerns some form of human monopoly of God along theological and judicial lines within the enduring need to define the truly human, proper conventions, moral practices and responsibilities toward the social good.

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In the face of partisan propensities in human behaviour, which are easily intensified through religious resources, the first writer of the Christian movement, the apostle Paul, articulates a radical critique of any religious allegiance in zeal for righteousness that obscures or diminishes grace. Paul’s writings are a perennial critique of religious aspiration precisely because religion is also a site at which tribal identity and allegiance can be intensified or even sanctified. This critique is particularly evident in Paul’s most comprehensive epistle, Romans, along with Galatians, the rallying documents of significant points of renewal in Christian identity.

Paul’s struggle with expressions of Christian community in regard to righteousness and its perceived source occurs at the following divide: righteousness is expressed by elevating tribally defined works of the law, as if to protect the eternal, thereby circumscribing the reality of God; yet righteousness gives testimony to the holy, just and good, in passion for the eternal through exposure to the reality of God.

The first expression of righteousness generates a state of partisan legislation toward the maintenance of an enduring tribal status quo, however valuable the experience of community it gives for some.

In the second possibility, in passion for and memory of faithful testimony to the holy, just and good as delight in the law, righteousness is an exposure to the eternal in creaturely deferral to grace amid the impossibility of securing human ideals, much less sustaining them as partisan imperatives.

The variegated crises of human life set the scene for the paradox of faith wherein these are resolved, not by the resources of human finitude, which include religious resources, but by the grace of God as the very source of human existence. The paradox is renewed constantly.

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An awareness of human mortality and the precariousness of human community is present from Abraham through every generation of religious memory and expression. This awareness and the social crises it generates in the desire to stave-off anxiety, has numerous witnesses—theological, philosophical and literary.

In New Testament testimony, the living God counters the mortal and all too often brutish expressions of human life through an utterly gracious movement to and for human beings in Christ. This non-religious affirmation, a resounding “yes” of God to humanity, is given in Christ through the initiative of incarnation, self-giving in passion and its eternal affirmation through resurrection.

The grace of God as the only possible source of our being is wholly independent of any tribal identity and its imperatives, however plausible these might seem.

The reality of God radically counters all human claims to the truth and way of God. If either Israel or church has any “privilege” in distinctiveness, it is only in its confession of finitude and faith as a response to God’s grace within this recognition or calling. If either fails, its failure is not according to a lack of religious virtue or activity but a failure to sustain testimony to human limits and the gracious affirmation of God toward all human life.

The expectation of a new time in Israel—a new heart, a new covenant—and reiterated messianically in Christ, indicates that human possibility is contingent on God’s initiative in grace.

Neither Israel’s calling nor Christian faith is religious per se. Their source does not originate in any human conjecture or cultural imperative but in the gospel of God. God’s initiative and self-giving in Jesus Christ, after the long pedagogy of grace in Israel’s story, is the primary focus of Christian faith. Resurrection is its affirmation. Life in the Spirit is its manifestation.

If this focus gives expression to religious practices and disciplines, these are always contingent and questionable before the permanence of grace—from beyond human resources—as their radical critique.

Christian testimony is a perennial critique of the partisan initiatives of cultural and tribal identity in the light of grace, even as the experience of grace, like relationships, requires specific disciplines, covenants and tangible expressions in human life and community.

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The story of Jesus Christ is uniquely Christian; it also encompasses the story of God and creation. Without the Judeo-Christian story, the criteria of engagement with God’s goodness expressed in creation are only vaguely perceived. Humans can only grope after and second-guess such criteria out of selected and fragmented phenomena of the world, human or natural, religious or secular.

The triune reality of God gives the story of grace that makes truthful engagement with creation possible—the love of God in Christ that illuminates the ultimate nature of reality as relational and self-giving, along with the story of creation in which the Spirit is also present as creative source of life in all things, yet always beyond human grasp.

The reality articulated by Christians has its human face in Jesus Christ; its possibility of being known and experienced is given by the Holy Spirit. Without Jesus Christ, we might be tempted to ascribe any phenomenon of creation to a spiritual vision of life. Without the Holy Spirit, we would not know that Jesus Christ is the human face of God.

Christians gather together to retell the story of Jesus Christ and its anticipation in Israel by breaking bread and listening to Scripture; this is integral to participating appropriately in the adventurous love of God for creation. In every time and place, Christian churches are also called beyond any religious horizon or tribal identity to where God is already present in the world. In triune reality, one does not occur without the other.

Through faithfulness to the Christian story of grace, we are continually renewed in truthful engagement with the world, non-religiously, as this was demonstrated in God’s redemptive self-giving for humanity in Christ and continues to be present in the world through demonstrative fruits of the Holy Spirit.

 

Method sources: Badiou Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism; Ebeling, Word and Faith; Jüngel God as the Mystery of the World; Käsemann Romans.