1Cor6v1-2 - grievance studied
Texting One Corinthians
“..When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases?..” 1Cor6v1-2
🤬 “..grievance..” - What is in view here? The context is civil law suits but here the greek is a term as vague as having a “thing or matter against someone”: πρᾶγμα pragma + πρὸς pros. Hard to say how strong it is helpful to translate/extrapolate this term as:
Other translations and the commentaries foreground “legal dispute” which clarifies relevant history, but risks isolating the principle to the niche of literal litigation.
Paul's later admonition re “trivial cases” implies matters smaller than I would ascribe “grievance” to - but perhaps that is pertinent: suggesting that all grievance, however minor, and especially the minor, is in view..
The term “grievance” chosen by ESV gives me much to think on for being both weighty and generic. “Grievance” carries a more escalated category of beef, a lingering antagonism, a formal debt or public grudge, of the sort crystalised by a Karen as a complaint to the manager, piled on tribally as a Montague-Capulet feud.
🤬 So, thinking on the weighty and the generic of grievance. Today, as a culture, we're exceedingly energised to take offence whilst being utterly unpractised in doing it well, speaking it clearly or resolving it cleanly. Grievance is a clickbait basic, easy fodder for outrage culture.
🎓 The Grievance Studies Affair perhaps generated more heat than light, but certainly it nudged into prominence those areas of academia which have built a syllabus and culture around grievance - and the perverse/tragic power that a spirit of grievance has to self-reinforcingly entrench a dogma. Hoaxing/lampooning this is ambiguous as to whether it is punching down at the wounded or punching up at the institutions which have coopted a grievance economy.
💄 Mary Kassian highlights the gaming of grievance by consciousness-raising in her portrait of the history of feminism. She references this technique from Mao, which plausibly migrated as a tool for catalysing a movement. Whether or not it paints a complete picture of feminism is moot, I am struck by my own susceptibility to the comfort I take in resentment in other contexts. I am pliable and easily allured by the devil or capitalism's invitation to believe that I am hard-done by, to believe that I am owed better, to believe that my predicament is sufficiently the fault of an other that I can be relieved of responsibility and be united with like victims in a posture of blame.
“Speak bitterness to recall bitterness. Speak pain to recall pain.” Mao Tse-Tung.
“..Consciousness-raising was a political technique used in the late 1940s by the revolutionary army of Mao Tse-tung in its invasion of North China. To assist in purging the villages of Japanese and Kuomintang control, the political revolutionaries called the townswomen to gather in the town squares to recite the crimes their men had committed against them..”
“..The essence of consciousness-raising was reconceptualization or reeducation of one’s normative patterns of thought. While this process occurred in varied ways and over varied periods of time, consciousnessraising within a small group followed a single general pattern. First, a woman was invited to join a discussion or support group to talk about women’s issues. In the course of group discussion, she was encouraged to share personal hurt and anger. As more and more women in the group “spoke bitterness,” they were led to see that the source of their discontent commonly stemmed from their relationship or interaction with the men in their lives—be it fathers, employers, colleagues, spouses, teachers, or other men. Bitterness grew as the participants concluded that men were responsible for women’s unhappiness..”
☮️ One of the tragic defining features of woke is pent up legitimate grievance curdling without means to mediate - and so it morphs into an elaborate collective identity of bitter victimhood which reads all power as power-over, all hierarchy as abuse, all authority as suspicious, all history as brokenness. Social Justice Warriors are justified in their posture unless cosmic mercy triumphs over justice. Does it?
💡 Now, perhaps more than ever, the church would offer good news to a hurting world if it had a methodology for reconciliation, for keeping short accounts, for living in the light, for porting wholesale forgiveness into culture at large and rendering a public plausibility structure for mercy. Grievance is happening all the time, through thought, word and deed, through negligence, weakness and our own deliberate fault. And if there is no ritual and no valve to release the debt, then behind the levy wall is a vast and growing reservoir of bitterness.
🕊️ The answer is not as simple as forgiveness. The world needs to know that skilful relational proportional justice is also within reach. We have to get beyond the governance structure of suspicion. However. Apologies and forgiveness would be a good place to start. And the smallest church is marriage. And navigating the daily risk of schism is a rehearsal for church unity generally.
🙇♂️ PJs are working on a reinterpretation of Apology Languages ~ it is a work in progress, more could be said. See the original quiz here and book here. I would propose to heavily modify the Chapman rubric as I think it's almost unhelpful to have apology languages co-branded with love-languages, as they're doing quite different things. Where the modes of Love have an idiosyncrasy to an individual's predisposition, the modes of Apology have moral ramifications and should in fact be tailored case-by-case according the circumstances of the grievance.
🙇♀️ However, a taxonomy of expectations about moral exchanges is good to clarify, and their five establish some helpful differentiation:
(Sorry-for-your-loss) - empathy/recognition
Expressing Regret - naming a falling-short
Taking Responsibility - owning the cost
Making Restitution - paying the cost transactionally
Repentance and changed behaviour - pays future cost in installments
Asking for Forgiveness - asks the cost to be written off
(Releasing Resentment) - audits incidental cost history and writes off.
🏯 PJs are also working on Cities of Refuge as a toolkit for reconciliation. Paul considers the church should be able to adjudicate conflict internally - having internally the skills and the forum, the rhythm and the appetite, the roles and the requirements, a pattern-book for how and a sufficient benefit to outweigh the cost of this judicial process. How?
🏗️ Where a church is just singing on Sunday and volunteering at foodbank, there's limited scope for significant conflict. It the relational infrastructure carries little weight, then little is at risk and it requires little attention, most clashes can be absorbed. In church-lite, where church is accessory rather than foundational to your life, if a clash cannot be absorbed, it is a low cost switch to church elsewhere - so either way, church-lite has little incentive to build infrastructure for grievance mediation and relational repair.
👰 🤵 Marriage is the smallest church, a theocracy in miniature, a world-making pattern for a city predicated on gift-economy, abundance and purposive Christocentricity.
🤬 Grievances happen. On the moving train of life, accidents happen, but the train must keep rolling. Through the faulty medium of language misunderstandings happen. God's people have sought to keep the peace, to flourish as a unity, and to navigate proportional structures for justice.
“These were the cities designated…that any one who killed a person without intent could flee there, so that he might not die by the hand of the avenger of blood, till he stood before the congregation” Js20v9
🎯 “incompetent to try..” - ἀνάξιοί anaxioi What is your theology of competence? We are to be mediators and peace-makers and enactors of justice, justly. There is a real skill to mediating, a difficult social/emotional intelligence is needed, a learned familiarity with precedent, a calculated sensitivity to trajectory, a big picture consciousness, and detailed focus, an ability to empathise, an ability to articulate. Paul assumes we know what good-enoughness is and expect it as a minimum requirement from our leadership and practice it amongst ourselves. Do we? Should we?
🔪 Exercising mercy/justice involves risk and cost. Note Solomon's gift for this is exercised deftly, with a sort of theatrical daring performative confidence ala William-Tell-arrow-to-apple or Charles-Blondin-wheel-barrow-over-Niagra. Devastating and convicting ~ they stood in awe:
“..And the king said, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other.” .. And all Israel heard of the judgment that the king had rendered, and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice..” 1Ki3v25-28
👀 Paul considers that doing social justice is a competence issue, and a before-a-watching-world issue. Grace that smuggles in a theology of mediocrity and incompetence is far from victimless. It is the enablement of corruption, the denial of more-than, the abandonment of hope and it is appalling to a watching world.
📏 “..trivial..” - ἐλαχίστων elachistōn Trivial cases - What is your theology of triviality? Everything matters, especially the small things, because if you can't get those right, what hope is there of larger social issues. Everything is a minore ad maius. So, tidy-your-room. So, don't-go-to-bed-angry. So, don't despise the day of small things. So, be faithful with a little. So too in church quibbles, household infractions, marital spats. Calibrate value and learn how to do virtuoso ethics.
Learn the nuanced vocabulary of apology
Learn how to find the resource to offer abundant mercy.
Learn how to administrate justice so deftly, that you're able to do it with live rounds, blindfolded, suspended a hundred foot in the air, before a watching world.