No Heroes, No Villains

One of the responsibilities I carry as an educator for future ministers is the obligation to disabuse. Students come to seminary with a lot of the same assumptions that non-future ministers hold, but they can’t afford to keep them. I spend three years both prying assumptions away from students and persuading them that they need not grab onto new ones.

The assumption of which I must disabuse students most adamantly is the belief that the world is made up of heroes and villains. A minister can’t afford such categorizations if they want to survive the work of building community and helping people make the world more as God intends it to be. They don’t need to like everyone; they just need to love everyone. Remember the saying, “God doesn’t make junk”?

The occupational hazard I endure is that students often believe they have “discovered” in seminary that the one they thought was a hero is actually a villain, or vice-versa. Instead of tossing out old categories, they flip them. They continue to think in binaries. Computers that think in binaries (zeroes and ones) are fine. Ministers require much more complexity in their moral analyses, but such complexities would tire anybody out, so resisting them is unfortunate but understandable.

In her history of the expedition that solved the mystery for Europeans about the origin of the Nile River, Candice Millard provides a wholly human account of a difficult set of journeys. River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (Penguin Random House Books, 2022) hangs its account of the British pursuit of geographical mastery on a rivalry between two explorers, Richard Burton and James Speke. Both sound like people I’m glad not to have known.

Burton was eccentric, eclectic, brilliant, and oblivious to the effect of his actions on people who sought his love and approval. Speke was insecure, desperate for affirmation, haughty, brave, and in possession of an unfathomable tolerance for pain. I’m pretty sure Millard liked Burton better, but she doesn’t go easy on either of these mid-19th Century British cartographical imperialists. She doesn’t let Britain off easy, either. In other words, she allows that which is complicated to be complicated.

I picked up The River of Gods because it was mentioned in an article sent to me by a colleague who knows about our school’s current work coming to terms with the intermingling of Christianity and imperialism. In his essay on a different book in the New York Review of Books (April 9, 2024), Douglas Bock Clark describes an emergent genre in literary nonfiction “in which famous expeditions, once told as swashbuckling stories of adventure, are recast within the tragic history of colonialism.” He places Millard’s account in that genre, which I now consider the literary equivalent of the reconciliation work to which our school is called.

• Fact: the school I serve as dean furnished the missionaries deployed by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions around the world in the 19th Century.
• Fact: those missionaries were earnest, optimistic, educated, well-meaning, stupid kids.
• Fact: their work resulted in a mixed bag of results during their lifetimes, and gates they opened to capitalism and militarism caused damage that bloodies their hands and sullies their legacies.
• Fact: the missionaries our current community has gotten to know really loved Jesus, and they wanted to spread good news. Doing so meant everything to them, so much so that they were willing to buy one-way tickets to parts unknown.

I’ve grown weary of attempts to end conversations with, “It’s complicated.” Ministers can’t get away with such evasion. Tensions between Jewish and Muslim communities result from an array of overlapping oppressions. Does that mean we throw up our hands and stop talking? Sure, if we don’t want community life to improve, or we want to ensure endless wars. Critique of harms caused by Christianity through its legacies of imperialism, antisemitism, and systematic punishment of identity divergence is utterly fair. It’s not enough, however, to make me love Jesus less. In fact, such messy realities remind me that I have to love Jesus more.

Because Jesus taught us that God loves everybody; no exceptions. That means that we honor God by loving everybody, and loving everybody means that we can’t treat people like they’re problems, or issues, or villains. They’re people, beautifully and wonderfully made, not objects or specimens awaiting our categorization. Christian ministers don’t categorize; we tangle. When we tangle, we build strong muscles that make it possible for us to wrap our arms around even the squirmiest, prickliest people we meet and force them to wrestle until a blessing descends on us both.

This wrestling is the call of Christian ministers because it’s the call of Christians, and Christians needs their faith leaders to encourage them to love and discourage them from dismissing human beings for the sake of emotional efficiency. Christian ministers remind those who seek to follow Jesus that the worthiest treasure we can ever discover is the one we find in the fascinating, messy, beautiful stories about each other, which we share through communities that make space for us to bring our whole selves.