Fernando Gros

The Obama And Pastor Wright Thing

The con­tro­versy sur­round­ing Barak Obama and his “con­tro­ver­sial” pastor Jeremiah Wright has been one of the biggest stor­ies of this cur­rent US pres­id­en­tial cam­paign. I would urge every think­ing Chris­tian to take the time to read Obama’s speech in response to his crit­ics. It’s a thought­ful explor­a­tion not just of US class and racial divi­sion, but also a chal­len­ging exegesis of the nature of church in the con­text of per­sonal spir­itual biography.

In lieu of an exten­ded com­ment on this con­tro­versy, I gathered some thought­ful quotes from a few of the many excel­lent blo­g­posts on Obama’s response.

I do want to say that this sear­ing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Chris­tian speech is the most honest speech on race in Amer­ica in my adult life­time. It is a speech we have all been wait­ing for for a gen­er­a­tion. Its abil­ity to embrace both the legit­im­ate fears and resent­ments of whites and the under­stand­able anger and dashed hopes of many blacks was, in my view, unique in recent Amer­ican his­tory.
from The Speech

“On one level, this is a state­ment of racial solid­ar­ity. But on another, it’s an argu­ment that the church is the embod­i­ment of the com­munity it serves, with all its imper­fec­tions, which Obama bluntly describes. This is a very old, very “Cath­olic” idea of the church as an organic expres­sion of “the people” as they happen to exist. It is likely to be baff­ling to those white Prot­est­ant Amer­ic­ans who think of church mem­ber­ship as more of a matter of con­sumer pref­er­ence, doc­trinal agree­ment or family her­it­age (none of which seem to have been major factors in Obama’s ori­ginal “con­ver­sion” at Trin­ity UCC) and who also prob­ably don’t under­stand why Obama didn’t just choose a dif­fer­ent con­greg­a­tion the first time he heard some­thing objec­tion­able from Wright’s pulpit.“
from Obama and His Church

“…what’s wrong with afro-centric? Espe­cially when much of Chris­tian theo­logy for the past 500 year or so has been ”euro-centric”. Of course we haven’t called it “euro-centric” Chris­tian theo­logy. We’ve just called it “Chris­tian”. Kind of like “person” meant “white person” for many cen­tur­ies. Or like “rational”, “pure”, “normal”, “clean”, “artic­u­late”, etc. meant “white”.“
from Thoughts on Obama and Wright

“Every Sunday thou­sands of right wing white preach­ers (fol­low­ing in my father’s foot­steps) rail against America’s sins from tens of thou­sands of pul­pits. They tell us that Amer­ica is com­pli­cit in the “murder of the unborn,” has become “Sodom” by cod­dling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evol­u­tion­ists and sex edu­cat­ors hell-bent on cor­rupt­ing chil­dren. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, “under the judg­ment of God.” They call Amer­ica evil and warn of imman­ent destruc­tion. By com­par­ison Obama’s minister’s shouted “con­tro­ver­sial” com­ments were mild.“
from Frank Schaef­fer Likens Jeremiah Wright to His Dad>

“If Obama knew of Wright’s con­tro­ver­sial nature, why didn’t he leave the church?

This ques­tion reveals a pretty sad under­stand­ing of church: an organ­iz­a­tion one joins or leaves solely because of one preacher (or one sermon). The church is not a social club to boy­cott if the Word raises hackles. The church is a com­munity of believers–the body of Christ–called together by God and seek­ing to wor­ship and serve.

Mem­ber­ship in a par­tic­u­lar con­greg­a­tion should be about that con­greg­a­tion as a whole–the rela­tion­ships with other mem­bers, ser­vice in the com­munity, oppor­tun­it­ies for spir­itual growth and dis­ciple­ship, pro­clam­a­tion of the gospel in word and deeds–and over­all, focused on wor­ship and serving the Triune God.“
from Two silly ques­tions sur­round­ing the Rev. Wright furor

“Sen­ator Obama’s favor­ite theo­lo­gian is… Rein­hold Neibuhr, whose long and influ­en­tial career at Union Theo­lo­gical Sem­in­ary in New York cast a web of influ­ence that caught up preach­ers and pres­id­ents alike, includ­ing per­haps most fam­ously Martin Luther King Jr. Asked by David Brooks of the New York Times what he took away from Neibuhr’s writ­ings, Obama said ““I take away the com­pel­ling idea that there’s ser­i­ous evil in the world, and hard­ship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can elim­in­ate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cyn­icism and inac­tion. I take away the sense we have to make these efforts know­ing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve ideal­ism to bitter real­ism.” Such a per­spect­ive embod­ies what Niebuhr called Chris­tian real­ism, a coun­ter­point to what he called America’s tend­ency to embrace a belief in the doc­trine of ‘spe­cial provid­ence,’ that is, the idea that we are a redeemer nation called to spread our light to others who struggle in darkness…

Why is this sort of per­spect­ive hard for many Amer­ic­ans to accept? At present, one of the over­whelm­ing reas­ons is the hyper-patriotic reac­tion to the ter­ror­ist attacks of Septem­ber 11, 2001… When people buy into the rhet­oric of Amer­ica as inno­cent, as guard­ian of the moral high ground, as some­how beyond the pale of cri­tique, then a Niebuhrian per­spect­ive sounds unpat­ri­otic at best.

If someone has the view of Amer­ica as inno­cent, and of pat­ri­ot­ism as uphold­ing glory of our nation’s ideals at any cost, then there is little room for a proph­etic cri­tique of the sins of the nation—slavery and the legacy of racism as a major case in point.”

from On Declar­ing ‘God Damn Amer­ica’: Obama and Wright, Neibuhr and Cone

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Obama, Jeremiah Wright, Theo­lo­gical Ethics, Ecclesiology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:54 pm. It is filed under Globalisation, Theology and Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.