Individual guilt differs
from corporate guilt, and individual repentance from corporate repentance, not
just quantitatively but qualitatively.
That’s going to require a
fair bit of explanation, especially for Christian readers born into our
hyper-individualistic Western culture. Most of us only think about the matter
of corporate guilt when we find ourselves summarily dismissing Progressivist
ravings about race- or gender-based privilege. We rightly reject being held
responsible for the long-term social impact of patterns of historical behavior in which we have
never engaged and from which we do not personally benefit. “Each of us will
give an account of himself to
God,” we say.
Full stop, move along now.
So then, please bear with
me a bit. Corporate guilt and corporate repentance are definitely biblical
concepts. The Left radically misapplies them, and cynically attempts to use
them to its own political advantage, but they are not exactly pulling the
idea out of nowhere.
Corporate Guilt and Corporate Repentance
Corporate guilt is not merely the sum total of all moral violations committed by individuals belonging to a particular group. It involves something more than volume, volume, volume. Corporate guilt occurs when individual sins become public sins: first tolerated; later rationalized away; institutionalized in the end. It produces a multi-generational
fog of moral inversion in
which children are conditioned to accept false default assumptions about right
and wrong and go on to promote these values unchallenged.
It is this extra component of mass social acceptance which makes corporate guilt qualitatively
different from individual guilt, and requires that it be repented of
separately.
Daniel’s famous prayer in chapter 9 is
all about corporate repentance for corporate guilt. It is national, not personal:
“We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules. We have not listened to your servants the prophets.”
Daniel, taken captive to
Babylon as a youth, had no part whatsoever in Israel or Judah’s rebellion
against the commandments of God. He was a devout man from the moment we
encounter him in scripture. To the best of our knowledge, he had never met a prophet or rejected the
voice of God. And yet he becomes the spokesman for a nation in desperate need
of repentance and restoration. Had he been the only Judean who had repented, then
surely the earthly people of God would have remained in Babylonian captivity.
But he was not. He gave voice to the cry of a generation of guilty descendants
of Israel eager and ready to get right with their God.
Consequences and Effects
Corporate guilt affects
everyone in a particular group, whether or not they are personally guilty of
anything. Godly Jeremiah was dragged to Egypt by
Judean rebels. Daniel prospered personally in Babylon, but many godly Judeans did not.
And regardless of his personal success, he remained forever a man of Judah and a true Israelite at heart, not
a Babylonian. He bore the stigma of believing in the God of Israel, and took
the personal risks that came his way because he refused to adopt the ungodly
practices and worship habits of his Chaldean captors. In fact, Daniel’s whole
life, personal and political, was molded and dictated by the actions of men and
women dozens and hundreds of years before he was born. Like it or not — individual
or not — he was part of a group corporately accountable to God, and he
knew it very well.
Corporate guilt involves consequences in this life. Corporate
repentance is about getting those ongoing consequences lifted or abrogated so
our corporate relationship with God may be restored and life may go back to
normal. Corporate guilt is not a matter to be judged at the great white throne
or the judgment seat of Christ; rather, the fallout from corporate guilt is usually
very much visible in the here and now. If it is not visible to you today, trust
me, it will be shortly.
And of course it should go without saying that genuine corporate repentance involves a great deal more than just saying, “Sorry, Lord, our bad.” It requires actually going and changing stuff at the institutional level. Those high places need to be torn down, false priests put to the sword, and Baal’s temple turned into a latrine.
A Familiar Passage in Luke
Okay, so where am I going with all this? Well, I’m going to Luke 13, actually. It starts with
a passage
we tend to interpret quite individualistically, which, I believe, is better understood corporately. We can still draw personal lessons from it, no
doubt, but we will not interpret it faithfully in its original context if we
come to it only as modern, Gentile individuals.
Here we go:
“There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.’ ”
Now, the standard message
we take from the Lord’s words here is this: Don’t
pass judgment on others because they happen to experience suffering in life.
Don’t assume they are guilty of anything unusually vile. You too need to get
right with God, or else you will go to hell.
These are not untrue statements, but they are not at all what Jesus was trying to communicate to his
first century listeners. They are at best extrapolations, even if they are
worthwhile extrapolations. They leave the Lord’s original meaning unexplored
and unconsidered.
A Little Context
Let’s start by examining the context a little. Luke 13 is decidedly corporate in character.
Everything that follows from this incident is both national and Jewish. The
parable of the barren fig tree in verses 6-9 is almost universally taken
to refer to the nation of Israel. The anecdote about the woman with the disabling
spirit in verses 10-17 involved a deliberate, Sabbath day provocation of
institutional Judaism, and the healed woman is specifically called a “daughter
of Abraham”. Uprooted from their usual context as part of the seven kingdom parables
in Matthew 13 and transplanted here, the parables of the mustard seed and
leaven in verses 18-20 are as accurate and damning a picture of the
kingdom of God in its then-current Jewish form — bloated, infiltrated and thoroughly
contaminated — as they are of any later iteration of the church. The narrow door analogy
of verses 22-30 makes reference to “Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all
the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out.” The “you
yourselves” here is unarguably and intentionally Jewish, as it is distinguished
in the very next line from “people from east and west, north and south.”
Finally, verses 31-35 are an eloquent lament over a Jerusalem that “kills
the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.”
The Lord is not mourning for a lost world in the climax of Luke 13, but specifically for his lost
covenant people, institutionally corrupt and in crying need of corporate
repentance.
Two Incidents
Bearing all this in mind, let’s have a look back to the first five verses. We have two incidents: one involving
Galileans, one Judaeans, encompassing both halves of the divided nation under
Roman rule. At least one of the two incidents had political overtones. Pilate
did not mingle the blood of Galilean worshipers with their sacrifices because
he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. He was making a political point,
putting a subject people in their place. He was sending a message to the
nation.
It is not at all unlikely
that the second incident had political overtones as well, as George Buchanan suggests here*, though
we cannot be sure. The Tower of Siloam was a relatively small, ancient, Syrian
structure situated along the old wall of Jerusalem in the shadow of a colossal
Roman fortress constructed by Herod. Its footings have been unearthed and
measured. The tower could easily have been toppled onto a group of Judaean
protesters by their Roman overlords to make a statement, but of course this is
pure conjecture. What we can be sure of is that the Lord’s original audience
knew perfectly well the circumstances of both tragic incidents to which he refers, and were in a far
better position to understand their full implications than modern readers, for
whom they are lost historical references of no particular import.
“Likewise” Times Two
So individual salvation and eternal destiny are not the subjects here. But the biggest hint that we are talking about national repentance (to usher in an earthly, Jewish kingdom) rather than personal repentance issuing in salvation is this: the word “likewise” (homoiĆs, meaning “equally” or “in the same way”), twice repeated, and the reference to “suffering”. The Lord is surely saying something like this: “Unless you repent as a nation, you Jews will find yourselves suffering and dying as randomly and
pointlessly as these, your fellow countrymen.” He is making
reference to the then-future destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, which took
place in the wake of a crushed Judaean revolt, a symptom of Jewish
intransigence and abject refusal to bow the knee to their God, confess their
guilt, and publicly acknowledge Jesus as their promised Messiah and deliverer.
The leaders of the nation decided they were up to ushering in the kingdom
themselves. They were not.
The historian Josephus
claims 1.1 million people were killed during Titus’ siege of Jerusalem,
the majority Jews, and that 97,000 more were captured and enslaved. This would
certainly call to mind the Lord’s words in Luke 13, “unless you repent,
you will all likewise perish.” Repentant Jews, for the most part, were already
long gone by the time the nationalistic Zealots drew the eye of Rome and
brought final judgment on their nation. These had converted to Christianity and
spread across Europe and around the Mediterranean, taking their faith to the
world.
All to say, if we’re going to use this passage as a call to repentance today, we had best get the
character of that repentance correct. It is corporate repentance that is in
view, not individual repentance of sins ushering in salvation.
A Useful Lesson to Consider
That’s still a very useful lesson to consider. Many of our churches are in quite a state today,
some not wildly incomparable to the condition of institutional Judaism in the
first century. The Lord calls us not just to individual repentance for our
various sins against him, but also to an attitude of humble re-examination of
what we do when we come together as a testimony to Christ. That is what Revelation’s letters to the seven churches are all about.
Where have our current church
habits and practices come from? Do they come from the teaching of Christ and
his apostles, or have they been absorbed by osmosis from the world around us? Is
there anything about the hypocrisy of first century Pharisees to which we might
inadvertently relate? Have we tested everything handed
down to us and held fast to the good, or have we simply accepted the traditions
of our spiritual fathers uncritically and without appropriate Christian
discernment?
Make no mistake, persecution of Christians is coming, and maybe sooner than later. When the
first Western 21st century believers are singled out to experience the wrath of
an angry secular mob, expect to see a few of their fellow Christians politely suggesting
that maybe the suffering they are experiencing is not the product of faithfulness
to Christ but rather a consequence of their own sin. (Who am I kidding? This is already happening.) Maybe these troublemakers were insufficiently
respectful of a woman’s “right to choose”. Maybe their churches were unacceptably
exclusionary and unwelcoming toward members of a particular rainbow
demographic. Maybe they voted for Donald Trump. Maybe they were “worse sinners” and “worse offenders”, and brought
unnecessary grief on themselves. Surely such a thing could never happen to us,
could it?
The Lord’s answer to that question may reasonably be inferred from Luke 13.
___________________________
* Buchanan says, “The eighteen who were killed when the Tower of Siloam fell might have been killed in a construction accident, but the fact that both chreias are mentioned together, and that the areas involved are geographically very close to each other, suggests that both events probably occurred at the same time and for the same reason, but this is only a deduction.”
No comments :
Post a Comment