Month: July 2023

Romans 8:26-39

In Romans 8:26-39, Paul continues to encourage his readers to patiently endure the labor pains of liberation that Hannah Bowman reflected on in last week’s Abolition Lectionary post. Here Paul encourages them by emphasizing God’s providence and foreknowledge. In Romans 8:28 he writes, “We know that God works all things together for good for the ones who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Paul states that God “knows them in advance” (NRSVue, this is translated as “predestined” in other translations) and has called them according to God’s purpose. The passage culminates with Paul’s exhortation to trust in God’s love for “nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created,” (Romans 8:38-30). 

God’s power and foreknowledge has been appropriated to uphold systems of control when used against the marginalized by the powerful, but the thrust of Paul’s argument in Romans is to criticize systems that rely on rules and punishments as ultimately death-dealing powers opposed to God’s work in Christ. He criticizes gentile Christ-followers who appropriate and misapply Jewish law to malign and marginalize other Christians in their community (see Eisebaum’s Paul was Not a Christian). He exhorts believers to uproot Roman class systems that divide Christian communities into the strong and weak (see Mcknight’s Reading Romans Backwards). Ultimately Paul is proposing a different understanding of justice that stands with the executed and oppressed in pursuit of liberation for all (see Keesmaat and Walsh’s Romans Disarmed as well as Mark Lewis Taylor’s Executed God). Consequently it is a misunderstanding of Paul’s argument to conclude that those God “foreknew” and call are working for anything less than “justification and life for all” (lest we forget Romans 5:18). 

God’s foreknowledge and power can be understood as a kind of control, but it is better understood as the kind of utopic vision that Mariame Kaba writes about when she states that “every vision is a map,” (We Do This ‘Till We Free Us). Likewise, many early Christian theologians interpreted our condition and constructed ethics based on eschatological beliefs about what God is calling us towards. Utopic visions and ethics based on telos become oppressive as control-methods, but they are tools of liberation when they inspire us to question the inevitability of the punitive systems we are embedded in and give us the courage and patience to endure the suffering that comes with demanding change. It is only then that our faith in God’s providence can become the basis of our hope in the abolition of prisons and policing and the triumph of a justice system that separates no person from the love of God or neighbor.

Sarah Lynne Gershon (she/her) is an MDiv/MTS student, DOC pastor, and lives at the Bloomington Catholic Worker. 

Romans 8:12–25

This passage from Romans promises the liberation of creation. In the promise that the creation will be set free from “bondage to decay” and will “obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (8:21) we see the abolition of death-dealing systems and powers such as policing and incarceration. Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us that abolition requires “changing everything.” Changing everything is the picture painted in this passage of the creation that is being renewed — although the form of renewal we see right now is that of the struggle for justice we are engaged in, “groaning in labor pains” (8:22). The acts of resistance by which incarcerated and criminalized people stand up for their own dignity, by which allies support them, and by which we all demand better systems of communal care rather than criminalization and “organized abandonment” are the labor pains of new creation. The renewal of creation encompasses more than prison-industrial complex abolition, but it does not encompass less. The abolitionist struggle is a making-real and visible of the labor pains of the new creation.

Renewal is not yet accomplished. Abolition puts us in the business of “hoping for what we do not see” (8:25). But what does it mean to wait for it with patience (8:25)?

Surely it does not mean that we cease our striving. Justice delayed is justice denied! Our patience is not a willingness to wait for the world to catch up with the demands of justice. Instead I wonder if patience here goes back to the Latin root of the word, suffering (like the Passion of Jesus). We hope for what we don’t see with the willingness to endure the suffering that is part of the labor pains.

I’ve given birth twice. My experience of the nature of labor pains is that yes, while they cause great pain, they are also unstoppable. The process proceeds whether you are ready to endure it or not. As we hope for the world we don’t yet see, I hope our patience takes the form of enduring that unstoppable force. As we participate in the building of a world without police or prisons, we are sharing in the unstoppable labor of God; we are groaning as we suffer under state violence and in solidarity with those targeted by state violence but all our groaning is part of an unstoppable wave of liberation. And our endurance makes us willing to stay in solidarity, to remain committed, to keep demanding a better world of accountability and care rather than becoming resigned to death-dealing systems of control and punishment.

Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.

Psalm 119:105-112

“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

The effects of the law in this section of Psalm 119 are intriguing (or at least should be!) to a society that claims to be governed by the “rule of law.” The Psalmist holds on to the law as a source of life and sustenance. They bring joy and serve as the inheritance that the Psalmist passes on. The role of Torah is complex in both Jewish and Christian circles, but the picture the Psalmist presents is clear: law should bring life for the psalmist and their community. 

The “rule of law” does not frequently serve this purpose in our system of retributive justice. Following the law does not intrinsically bring you life and quite often it is used to bring about death, both for offenders and for those who exist at its whims. In the United States, from the beginning law was constructed to accrue advantage for some people at the expense of others—most obviously in the enshrinement of slavery. The legacy of such origins endures to this day, bringing life rather than bringing death. 

For some, the first step toward PIC abolition is looking at the effects the law has now. When you live comfortably and, for the most part, don’t interact with the legal system, you don’t see these effects. But once you see them, you can’t unsee them. The laws we have make it expensive to be poor, keep people yolked to their incarceration long after release, and shield law enforcement from the laws they are supposed to enforce. Where Torah is meant to bring life to its followers, our laws so often do the opposite. 

Abolition has an expressive goal that is quite clear and singular in our case, but it is connected to so much else that doesn’t work in our world. When preaching about the life that comes from the imperatives of our Scriptures, pastors should point out the ways in which the laws of the state that we actually follow fall short of God’s will for us. It’s those laws that create the systems we want to abolish and for some, the journey to becoming an abolitionist starts there. 

Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.

Zechariah 9:9-12

As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.

Zechariah 9:11

In the latter portion of Zechariah, most likely a later addition written under the threat or rule of the Greeks, we see a clear portrait of the “demilitarized dominion” of God (David L. Petersen’s words from the New Oxford Annotated Bible). Presented is a common image in prophetic literature of God destroying the weapons of war used to govern the present age and pronounce God’s rule in the age to come. Matthew later connects this specific passage to the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, linking this newly disarmed world to the purposes of his ministry. 

Zechariah rejects a few critical things in this passage: weapons of war (chariots, war horses, battle bows) and incarceration. The specific form of incarceration referenced here is likely related to military prisoners given the references to war. Freedom for these captives of opposing nations from imperial powers represents liberation for the whole of Zechariah’s people. At the same time, the prisoners could refer to exiles as deportation was a repeated trauma of the Jewish people at the hands of larger Ancient Near Eastern empires. 

For our purposes, we need not see Zechariah’s promise of an end to incarceration so narrowly. The prison industrial complex of the United States specifically is a mechanism of these same dominating powers that plagued Zechariah’s time. Our systems of incarceration wield deportation as a weapon just as ancient empires did. The internal policing of Americans often looks like militarized occupation, especially in times of protest and resistance to police brutality. Prisons are very much the “waterless pit” (v. 11, NRSV) of the country, resulting in intense pain and future marginalization in our social structures. 

God promises freedom from these powers and we ought to declare that freedom from our pulpits. We must declare God’s intentions for these institutions to pass away and be replaced by the kingdom of peace promised in Zechariah. 

Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.