Paula Cooey is the Margaret W. Harmon Professor of Christian Theology and Culture at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has written many books including: Family, Freedom, and Faith: Building Community Today and Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis. Her work has also appeared in numerous academic journals.
Cooey's book Willing The Good: Jesus, Dissent, and Desire was recently published by Augsburg Fortress Press. I reached her in St. Paul, Minnesota, to speak about the book.
Gerry McCarthy: In Willing The Good you write that: "In short, inheriting the kingdom of heaven depends on finding Jesus in the other as the other is, in her or his specificity, without requiring reciprocity or accommodation." This a critical part of the book isn't it? It's something that runs counter to "compassionate conservatism?"
Paula Cooey: Throughout the book, I'd been trying different ways to make the point that ethical behaviour is not about the purity or morality of the ethical agent. It's about the need and distress of the other. So much of our discourse on ethics and morals is about the moral agent. In Christianity this takes the form of imitating and being like Jesus. I understand that tradition, and I'm not trying to discount it. I'm trying to go beyond it and say: But if we stop there, it's only about whether we're ethical or not. When the issue is the radical needs and demands of the other.
This is something that came to me through working with Luther, whom I have a hard time with, because he's so obnoxious as a person. But he had a radical sense of finding Jesus in the other. When I read Matthew 25:40 (and that's what I'm trying to unpack when I write these words) it suddenly hit me that if you want to know what Jesus looks like, who he is, and what he is like, then you don't look at a morally perfect person --you look at the person in need. Because that's what he told you to do.
We look at those passages all the time. We fall asleep through them, because we've heard them so often. But that was a big revelatory moment for me, and it re-shaped the whole book.
It certainly isn't compassionate conservatism I'm writing about. But it's also not standard operational Christian moral discourse either.
GM: In the book you explain that: "An economy of grace thrives on change, transformation, surprise, the disruption of established ways of thinking and acting, even as it bears witness to steadfastness, harmony, and beauty." You add that: "One who lives in this economy participates simultaneously as lover and beloved." How does this differ from the economy of scarcity?
PC: An economy of scarcity is an economy that assumes that human self-interest is at the heart of what drives human desire and behaviour (and that it's necessarily competitive, because it's natural to compete). What this means as a human being is that one is always in the position of acting for oneself, proving oneself, competing with others, and protecting and preserving oneself. That is a defensive position to work from. It says that in the last analysis one does not believe for a moment one is accepted and loved. It also means anything that threatens the establishment of the self (which would include established ways of thinking and fitting in --especially if you're winning in this ongoing competition) is terribly threatening, because it goes right to the core of one's self-interest.
If one operates out of an economy of grace there is nothing to prove. You have less bondage to established ways of thinking, and less at stake in the face of change.
GM: Recently the Governor of the Bank of Canada David Dodge said "efficiency" and "competitiveness" should be paramount in all sectors of the economy. He also said parents must ensure children are ready to learn when they enter school, because they're "developing workers." This is the economy of scarcity isn't it?
PC: Yes. An economy of scarcity has as its task to produce human beings who are worker-consumers, and who are the means to the end of keeping the machine going (from which only a few seriously benefit materially). I'm trying to go at that and attack it as hard as I know how. That's why I picked economy of grace. It's an old-fashioned concept of a divine economy. It's not new. But it hasn't been used in a long time. It goes all the way back to the early theologians. For example: The notion of an economic trinity, or the notion of the inner workings of the divine as an economic unity. I went back to that, because it's a different ordering from how we order in modern society. The difference is that you are always a competitive worker-consumer in an economy of scarcity. You're an end in itself --not simply a means-- in the economy of grace. That's Kantian language. That's another thing I picked up in writing this book.
GM: So we're developing workers for production in the economy of scarcity?
PC: Yes --and by the way, for unemployment. We think it's unrealistic and unwise to have full employment, because that will create inflation. You have to have a certain percentage (around four percent) of unemployed worker-consumers in order not to pay them too much.
GM: You write about the "anti-dissident strategies" that oppress us. At one point you explain that: "De-politicization of Jesus likewise renders faith quietistic, that is, a private, psychological, internal matter that does not relate to daily ethical, political, and economic practices." Can you talk to me about this a bit more? This is spiritual narcissism isn't it?
PC: Yes --it's a spiritual narcissism. It's particularly prevalent in this country probably more than Canada. It's an odd by-product of the separation of church and state where you end up thinking you have to separate religion and politics --which can't be done. But the way you do that is by individualizing religion and --in some ways-- making religion a commodity. So you go and find the right religion for you. It has to do with your privacy and solitude. Your main concern is: Are you pious enough? What that leads to is the narcissism we talked about. You see Jesus as having been put on earth to save your soul. In other words: Jesus is here to save you. This is especially true for the Evangelical population where Jesus is here to save sinners. If you are saved, maybe you will go do those individual acts of charity. But you never see systemic political and social problems, because everything is individualized, made solitary, and private.
There is a left-wing (or more moderate) Evangelical movement in this country that is much more social Gospel oriented. But much of the Evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal side of U.S. culture is about the individual salvation of your individual soul. If you are saved you're supposed to act without reference to any wider critique of the culture.
GM: You write that: "The resources and disciplines of grace detach one from emotional involvement in and dependence on a system of profit and loss, credit and debt as the measure of worth, to new life without the need to measure the self at all." This is potentially liberating for humans in a world where we're relentlessly measured against particular standards isn't it?
PC: On the one hand you have the economy of scarcity. On the other hand (and sometimes for good reason) you have a religious tradition both Catholic and Protestant that pours over the worth of the soul. It can range anywhere from an Evangelical tradition, to simply the constant concern with guilt you see in some Calvinist and Catholic groups. In order to perpetuate that, you also hear a continual emphasis on self-sacrifice. What I'm countering is not only an economy of scarcity, but also a religiosity that says: You can never be good enough. Your soul is never good enough.
In an economy of grace you're free from both sides of that coin. You're free from ego, narcissism, and the attempt to prove your worth in a conceited way --on the one hand-- and devaluation of yourself on the other. In the last analysis, if the love is all-inclusive you're in it. You're not outside it. You are both beloved and lover. You're empowered not only to love, but you're empowered because you are beloved. This is the Good News. You don't have to worry about you anymore.
GM: One of the most beautiful passages in the book comes near the end: "Love is always in the making, the figure of Jesus confronting us in the most surprising circumstances, teaching us, disciplining us to a new desire until this desire becomes the breath within us upon which our lives depend." This contrasts sharply with a finite self-interested desire doesn't it? Can you talk to me about this?
PC: One of the things that quickly comes to mind is the difference between being energized and being a consumer. As consumers we're ultimately consumed by our own desire. As people who are both loved and loving we're energized and we're sent back out. We don't have to protect ourselves in the same ways. This is not easy. I'm not even suggesting that it is. But if we even have a glimpse of what it can mean --that's a start. If we can just keep returning to that glimpse it sustains us longer each time. It's the difference between being energized and drained.
GM: This is thinking of "desire" much differently.
PC: We don't think about participating in God's love --or our own immediate participating in it-- as tied to desire. We don't use that language. We've psychologized desire. We've deprived it of its fuller meaning. It is a psychology. But it's also sociology, an economics, politics and spirituality. We've impoverished that notion of desire. We think of desire as something natural and it isn't (in the sense I'm using it). We're not born consumers. We're born needing milk, but we're not born in the high-class capitalist sense of being ready to buy. We're taught that. But we're not just taught to buy. We're taught to want.
But we aren't taught --even in our churches sufficiently--
that we could want (in all our finitude) what God wants. Also: That we could want without needing to control --and without knowing what it is (in some total way). That we could want a good we only partially know for people we don't even like is just alien. It's not how we phrase "Love your neighbour as yourself." That's not how we teach people. We teach one another to want everyone to be like us, because so much of what is good out there is --in a finite sense-- good for us. We're the ones who are affluent enough, because it's natural to want what you have for other people if it's good. That's a certain kind of generosity. It's easy to understand how that happens.
We are not taught to want a good we can't fully know. That's incomprehensible. We're not taught to want for people we wouldn't want to sit next to in a room. I just don't mean poor people, children, and orphans. I mean murderers, child molesters, and predators. We don't want good to include them. It's almost impossible for us. But if Jesus meant what he said, they're in there too.
GM: In the book you explain that: "The creeds, including the more modern ones, when viewed as authoritative for all times, are likewise problematic, because they, for the most part, do not recognize plurality, fail to incorporate dissent even in limited forms, and do not explicitly validate any challenge to political and economic values and practices." Have you talked about this with church hierarchical authorities? What reaction would you anticipate?
PC: I anticipate hearing: "You're not understanding it." But I'm not the first to suggest that the creeds don't reflect what would be clearly manifest to us as political activity, because they don't talk with any specificity about the life of Jesus. The Nicene Creed talks about working for the glory of God at one point. But it doesn't say what that means. That can sound like the spiritualization we talked about. Or it can sound like: Get out there and do stuff. But that's not what we hear. What we hear is: Jesus is God and he loves us. We also hear all about our salvation through the atonement at the beginning, middle, and end of the creed. So we think: We do good things for other people one at a time.
There are all kinds of people who live their lives differently from that. I try to capture that in the stories in the book. I'm just saying it's hard to get out of this creed. You have to be a willing, educated, and thinking person to get out of the communion of saints that we're talking about a whole lot of people who died on behalf on others.
With regard to church hierarchical authorities: In the Calvinist Presbyterian Church I attend they did a book signing for me. The pastor responded to this and connected me to the Barman Confession, which was Karl Barth and his colleagues' confession in highly theological language to take a stand against the Nazi Christian church. If you look at that confession you know that it's a firm political "No" to the appropriation of Christianity for genocidal purposes.
I felt my pastor mentioning that was odd. It made a certain sense. But I thought: Who would get this? But I didn't say anything to him, because if you know the history, I'm honoured.
But what I write about doesn't fly with the church hierarchy, because they either hear the creed differently or they want to keep a relative regulatory control over laity. What I'm saying empowers people to challenge authority --including their authority.
GM: At one point in the book you write that: "We also know that people sometimes rattle off their locations as if this meant that they were not called in certain profoundly ethical ways to exceed the limits of their individual and social experience. To me 'location' can connote property, real estate; I find such a proprietary conception of identity misleading." I found this important and interesting. Can you talk to me about it?
PC: I was thinking of what it meant to say: I'm a white feminist who grew up in the 1960s. That sounds like I've told you something when --in fact-- it doesn't in a certain way. It can say: Therefore I'm not a black feminist and so I can just talk about my stuff, because I know I'm limited. Instead of saying: This calls me to move beyond my whiteness and be critical of my feminism. Also: To take into account how secularized I am as a Christian in ways that do justice.
There are good things that come out of secularism. That's not as clear in the book. Secular means "this worldly" and I'm glad I'm this worldly. Christian means a lot of hideous things sometimes. Because of the slipperiness of words (and of the capacity for self-deception) I'm less sure about saying those things than I was twenty years ago.
We act like having said where we come from means (in every metaphorical as well as literal sense of that notion of location) that we're not called to imagine otherwise. That's the thing that worries me the most.
Gerry McCarthy is Editor of The Social Edge.
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