Brian Hamilton

More on Dissent

I began an earlier post mostly in agreement with Avery Dulles’s statement that “dissent should be neither glorified nor vilified,” leaving disastrously unsaid what kind of dissent or dissent with respect to whom. A friend responded this way:

While I agree that dissent has its limits and that it can become an idol, I think we have to keep in mind the broader global context in this discussion. As long as their are countries where dissent is criminalized and repressed, ambivalence to dissent is complicity with that repression. As we see with the biblical prophets, dissent is not always an action taken from a position of equal power. Its sometimes going to end up getting you tossed down a well. In Colombia, where I worked with Christian Peacemaker Teams, dissent may get you branded a guerrilla and things may happen to you and your family much worse than Jeremiah’s fate.

The whole postmodern paradox of no recognized authority and nothing to rebel against is fairly limited in global terms. The vast majority of global citizens know full well where the authority and power lies in their communities. And they also know the feeling of powerlessness in trying to change “the way things are.”

And so he called me out on my being trapped in the American academy, where dissent is really so tame as to mean something like theological disagreement and where we even have the luxury to think that there are no authorities. Another friend, then, called attention to the fact that I make dissent in the church sound more tame than it is, since churches tend to react drastically and even violently in response to internal dissent. Both crucial points.

I was deeply jarred by the comments, not because they really dismantle what I had said but because they showed me my forgetfulness. I tried to recover and clarify, amend, saying these things:

Thanks, Tim, for broadening this out into places where dissent is both more urgent and terrifying. I should have located this piece beforehand: I prepared it last semester for a discussion on authority in the church in response to an American theologian (Avery Dulles). Totalizing this ambiguous stance towards dissent, you’re right, would be catastrophic in political-social situations of violent oppression. The church ‘dissents’ from every evil, every darkness, wherever it is found—or better she repudiates it outright in preaching her gospel of light and love. She mourns with those who mourn, rejoices with those who rejoice, works alongside those with eyes to see the terrible violence of our world.

If I may make a theological response to your comment, though (it’s the only kind of response I’m any good at making): even here, dissent cannot be first or most fundamental. As Karl Barth says, the Yes of God’s gospel precedes the No of God’s judgment. This renders God’s judgment no less severe, but always subsequent—confessionally rather than chronologically speaking—to the proclamation of God’s joyous light of glory. So we don’t go around preaching dissent but rather the love of the Christ who has conquered sin and death. We don’t go around supporting dissent per se so much as we act under the true authority and power of the risen Christ (which proves all other powers penultimate). Maintaining this priority makes worship an indispensable dimension of peacebuilding, and suggests that part of ‘getting out there and doing something about it,’ at least for the Christian, is getting down on your knees to pray.

I think all I wanted to say with the post, in the end, was this: dissent is necessary and good, it keeps us unsettled and always moving towards faithfulness, but that in the church dissent cannot be reckless.

12 January 2007 |
tags: Ecclesiology, Theological Ethics