Obedience and Fulfillment

Editor’s Note: Sarah finding and reading a Dorothee Soelle book she hadn’t gotten to yet and my first viewing of Downfall recently coincided with an invitation to speak on unexamined agreements at work in my learning community. Colleagues have been kind enough to request my notes. I share them here. As ever, I welcome feedback.

Over ten years ago, in a workshop like this but a whole lot smaller, we were tasked with addressing some question or other when Mike Pinter apologized for interrupting our flow to throw out another question he wanted us to consider. Lovely twist: He asked us to consider it without answering it out loud.

On their 1995 Album Tragic Kingdom, No Doubt has a song called “Don’t Speak.”

Don't speak, I know what you're thinkin'
And I don't need your reasons
Don't tell me 'cause it hurts.

Mike’s “Don’t Speak” taunt provocation made his gift of a question even more of a gift. I’m still thinking about it. It went a little something like this:

If your syllabus was a promise, what would it say? Isn’t that a generative question?

I received it as a summons to dream harder and more imaginatively and more relationally and in a more granular way about what I want to see happen in my work with students. What am I promising them? What have I agreed to and what have they agreed to?

“Christ-centered.” How do I read it? What am I being invited to do when I find those words in my Inbox? What am I doing when I form those words on my lips. What am I signaling?

In her work on the Third Reich, the German theologian Dorothee Soelle dramatizes the essential distinction between obedience and fulfillment as she thinks through what life in Christ has meant and might yet mean across our contexts.

She saw obedience as conformity and deference rooted in fear. Fear of not being in compliance with someone else’s standards. Submission. Subordination. Following orders. Playing along to get along. Closed fist.

Fulfillment, however, is an open hand. A different play entirely. If the beginning and end of life in Christ is love sweet love. Christ-centered play expands the space of the talkaboutable by listening to others, receiving and learning from the witness of those who differ from me. Christ plays, after all, in 8 billion places. A strong center in Christ (candor, conscience, creativity) means love overcoming fear. When my center is strong, I’m less nervy and afraid, less likely to police my edges. Less prone to want to try to control people. Less anxious about what other people believe.

And MORE CURIOUS about what it is I’m up to with students and faculty and staff and myself. More alert to power differentials, more open to possibly unflattering feedback.

For purposes of discussion, I’m going to place two terms in front of you. I have definitions. They’re mine but I don’t wish to insist they need to be someone else’s too.

The terms: Spiritual abuse & Christian supremacy 

Spiritual abuse is a form of violence, whether in speech or behavior, in which I try to deny someone the right to assess their own thoughts, feelings, or experiences without me or, more broadly, apart from the  community or tradition I imagine I’m adhering or being true to. I don’t have to be conscious of it to be guilty of it. It’s subtly undertaken and subtly detected. To see it requires slowing the tape and discerning what I’m too prone to speed or rush past in my own words, attitudes, and actions. I can’t see myself as a spiritually abusive person until I begin to detect my own quickening pulse, my own sense of hurry, haste, and defensiveness when confronted with incoming data that doesn’t flatter me or favor the optics of the position I’ve staked out. It seeks to control the conversation. It is, of course, grounded in a kind of fear.

I can easily avoid the language of spiritual abuse by fessing up to my own finiteness—my own situatedness—at every turn. I can speak in terms of my own experience, admitting its limits, and declining to try to rhetorically universalize my feelings, my thoughts, my confession, and my position. I succumb to spiritual abuse when I center my own take, double down, and essentially should on someone else.

Christian supremacy is spiritual abuse with funding. It doesn’t play well with others, because, at bottom, it won’t quite let them be. Were we to name it as a posture and a position and an awkward feeling in our context, we might say that Christian supremacy can abide students and faculty who aren’t Christian and won’t become Christian, but Christian supremacy has an awfully hard time accepting that there are those among us who must not become Christian. That’s the can’t quite let them be part.

Can a learning community be Christ-centered without centering Christianity?

Don’t speak.