Empire & English-Onlyism Versus Pentecostal Existence & Christian Freedom
Instead of doing a negative rant on nationalism as idolatry, I decided the best way to discuss Independence Day/July 4th/ “Americuh Day” is to discuss what it means to be free for the Other. The recent debates about states instituting immigration laws (rather than letting the Federal Government do its job) as well as the push for English-Only education, voting and business practices have got me thinking about what does Creator and Savior of the world have to do with language and the placement of human bodies.
Actually, quite a lot if, as a Christian, you continue to think about God Incarnate in Christ Jesus. More specifically, let us go all the way back in time to the mid- 2nd century, about 100 years after Christ ascended into heaven (people guess between 115-125 A.D./Common Era) to the city of Lyons, somewhere close to modern day France. Our hero, Irenaeus of Lyons, a priest and a prolific writer. I do not have time to tell of the details of his debates with the Gnostic heretics of his day, but for our purposes, in sum, the Valentinian Gnostics believed in three races of humanity: material, psychic and spiritual & that the God of the Old Testament, was responsible for the material (the undesirable realm).
As I am re-reading J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account, the prologue is entitled, “Prelude on Christology and Race: Irenaeus as Anti-Gnostic Intellectual.” What interests me here is Carter’s reading of Irenaeus’s view of atonement, the recapitulation theory. Think of a debate team, and one of the squad’s gives closing argument; that is how Christ, the Word of God works. Jesus the Messiah finishes what Adam could not: a life of obedience. In Christ Jesus’s MATERIAL body (his flesh), the God-Man actually did become human to include “all the nations, and languages and generations of men dispersed after Adam” into God’s plan of salvation for humanity (Against Heresies III, 22, 3).
As Carter, through the work of Tzvetan Todorov, argues, that the discovery of the American continent by Christopher Columbus, has its very beginning with the anti-Christ logic. Columbus created a hierarchy of language, Latin being supreme to the foreign tongues of the First Nations people he met. In other words, Columbus gives birth to empire by simply speaking and writing it into existence. The logic of Columbus (and his heirs, the English-Only advocates) depends on the myth of a language as pure, and thereby setting up the possibility of a Master Language.
The LORD’s body carries the story of both the Creator and creation; language, nations, and ethnicity are re-presented in Christ’s Jewish covenantal flesh–Carter’s term. In order to come to this conclusion, Christians have to see the story of Israel as tied to the story of Creation, and that the Triune Creator has forever tied God’s own story in bodily majesty.
In short: Christ unites all of the stories of every nation and tribe. Because of this unity, we must reject monoliguism, i.e., English-Only in favor of a Church that lives out the Pentecost, with multiple languages addressing one Lord and one Father and one Spirit. It is humanity’s oneness in the New Adam whereby Christians should reject every and any form of hierarchy when it comes to language, race, and nationality.
Clik here to view.
